Photo-Op: San Fran Pram

Surreal found tableaux from the streets of San Francisco. A photographic review of Susan Ehrens's "The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel."

July 12, 2013 3:12 p.m. ET

Urban photography is usually defined by the human figure. The people on city streets draw the eye into an image and serve the most basic function of defining the scale and context of the scene. But Rose Mandel was only passingly interested in people. She preferred to catch a city's essences through the relics and detritus of its inhabitants. With no person visible, as in Mandel's 1952 study of a baby carriage in San Francisco (above), we are left to puzzle out what we are looking at. Has the pram been abandoned? Is the mother just around the corner? Or is this actually a child's toy and the entire scene a carefully...

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