Excerpt from book: 
This ten-year retrospective of Joel Meyerowitz' work offers a magnificent portrait of an era that corresponds with what many Europeans consider the American Way of Life. Nowadays, the street or the public space, as we now rather cynically call it is no longer the sanctuary it seemed to be back in the sixties. For photographers the street had, at times, been a utopian place of sorts, the place where real life unfolds. Perhaps this has always been a myth; the fact remains that the urban street of the West has become a fully controlled space where CCTV cameras are constantly focused on passers-by who no longer have any privacy. Another of the professional photographer's impediments is the legal limitations on photographing individuals in the street without their permission. This raises several questions: What are the chances of survival for the 'real' street photographer? Are we still willing to trust the spontaneity of his subjects? Is it possible that the tradition created by Meyerowitz has come to an end?