Garry Winogrand photographed the street from the late 1950s until his death in 1984, and the negatives from those years have long been quarried for retrospective surveys. The Man in the Crowd, published by Fraenkel Gallery in 1999, reverses the usual emphasis: it is the first book to treat the street photographs as a body of work in their own right rather than as one chapter among several.

The volume gathers 107 full-page duotone reproductions, more than half of them unpublished at the time it appeared. Square in format — roughly eleven inches to a side — and running to 165 pages, it gives each frame the room of a plate instead of a footnote. The pedestrians who fill it, jostled and caught mid-stride, are the subject rather than the backdrop to one.

Writing about these pictures tends to reach for their nervous energy and their ring of truth. John Szarkowski’s description of Winogrand as “the central photographer of his generation” is repeated often enough to have hardened into shorthand. Fran Lebowitz contributes an introduction that considers New York in the 1970s and Winogrand’s relationship to life on the street; Ben Lifson supplies an essay on the larger meanings of the work and its place in the history of art. Jeffrey Fraenkel and Frish Brandt also appear in the book’s credits.

For a collector, the case for this book is structural rather than sentimental. Because so much of the material had not previously been published, the sequencing allows a reading of Winogrand’s street practice that the large retrospectives cannot manage: sustained attention, picture by picture, to the crowd as a recurring subject. Its square pages and generous plates make it an object to be handled and read, not merely consulted.