How odd that Rudy Burckhardt and Weegee should have been wandering around New York taking pictures at the same time. Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968), the foulmouthed, disheveled sensationalist, learned how to use a camera while working in the darkroom at Acme Newspictures, and swamped the tabloids with dark pictures of New York City corpses and fires, and assorted categories of mayhem. Rudy Burckhardt (1914-99) came to New York in 1935 from his native Basel, Switzerland, with a $20,000 inheritance and a thorough grounding in the classic culture of Europe. His poised, sophisticated photographs calmly take the streets of New York apart like a Swiss clockmaker taking a watch apart to study the pieces, and then putting them together again to see it run. “New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937-40,” currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, displays an album with 67 pictures by the photographer interspersed with apposite poems by his friend Edwin Denby (1903-83). The Gotham we see in this handmade scrapbook could be on a different planet from the one depicted by Weegee.

The album is divided into three parts, each introduced by one of Denby’s poems. Part 1 consists of 11 pictures, close-ups that render the details of the buildings involved as abstractions. The first was taken from far enough away that we can read the names of the building’s occupants painted on the window: Belt Butler Co./N. Feldman Succ/Raw Furs & Ginseng/etc. The writing provides a social context, but the strongest visual elements are the heavy rustication and the arch of the material that surrounds the window, the contrast with the smoother finish of a part of the building to the left, and the metal door surmounted by a small-mullioned window to the left of that. The carefully detailed image also includes a deteriorating curb and the adjacent cobblestone street.

The next several pictures were taken closer to the structures involved, and emphasize the point where the buildings meet the sidewalk, where vertical becomes horizontal. They date from a time when commercial buildings were handsomely embellished, so we see the richness of their materials, but also the inevitable beginnings of its decay. In “[Building Front Detail with Manufacturing Company Plaques, New York City]” (1938) the stone is weathered and discolored, there is a bird dropping, the sidewalk is uneven and cracked. Then Burckhardt gets closer yet in a series of portraits of standpipes, photographed as if they were important personages. “[Standpipe, New York City]” (1939) is a study in industrial elegance, like pictures by Charles Sheeler or Albert Renger-Patzsch, but simpler. The final image is the surface detail of a building’s stonework, as abstract as a painting by Richard Pousette-Dart.

The pictures in Part 1 are interesting but, like much that is Swiss, lack great excitement. In Part 2 the tempo picks up, and the emphasis is on busy displays of signage. Burckhardt seems to want us to look past the implications of the signs’ commercial messages and view them as abstractions, much as we might regard calligraphy in an unknown language; this is like telling someone not to think of a bear. We can find what significance we want in these advertisements for cigarettes, Coca-Cola, Creamsicles, barbershops (“aircut 20¢”), movies, and Gobi’s Kornoff (“positively removes corns and callouses with out pain …”), but Burckhardt moves to undercut such significance by getting closer, shooting signs we can read in one picture so tightly in another that there are only parts of words, letters cut off from meaning. One wonderful picture of a sidewalk newsstand shows the magazines of the day — G Men, Thrilling Spy, Police Gazette — with the week’s issue of Life prominent in the middle: A grim picture of Mussolini stares out from the cover; it is 1939.

In Part 3 a flood tide of humanity enters to animate the streets. The buildings and signs that were the subjects of the first two parts are here background. Burkhardt’s street photography is more casual than that of other masters of the genre. He rarely captures the drama seen in the work of Walker Evans, the prurience of Garry Winogrand, or the poignant anecdotes of Helen Levitt, but he does have a feel for the rhythm of the street, for the way people move along a sidewalk. Denby was not only a poet, but also a dancer and an important writer on dance who enjoyed the dance-like moves New York pedestrians use to navigate the city, and Burckhardt may have acquired some of his appreciation of this from him.

In the first two parts of “New York, N. Why?” the pictures are presented one to a page, but in Part 3 there are usually three or four, and they are carefully arranged. The feel is frequently one of being at an intersection where people are moving in counter directions. Burckhardt is good at finding the pattern that establishes the harmonious way masses of people have of moving through space without colliding. As you look at the pictures, individual faces and bodies emerge from the groups, and recede back into them. In some groupings the passersby are shown only from the neck down, as anonymous bodies and their interesting clothing parading past. On one page, there is only one person in each image, two men in the top two, two women below, and they are moving away from each other, headed off the page. We see them in profile against buildings similar to those seen in Part 1, the transience of the walkers contrasting with the apparent permanence of the buildings. Denby writes, “In a split second a girl is forever pretty,” telling us exactly what it is a camera does.

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