The Barrow- Quartier des Marolles, Brussels

Whether by design or by accident, Whistler’s small, stage-like, close-cropped images echo urban photographs by John Thomson, a documentarian of lower- and working-class London neighborhoods. The Barrow recalls Thomson’s Cheap Fish of St. Giles from the book Street Life in London. The book included articles juxtaposed with photographs “taken from life,” meant to provide “unquestionable accuracy” of the urban poor’s marginal existence. Yet, like Whistler’s images, these photographs were carefully staged.