The New York school of photography is identified by Jane Livingston as "a loosely defined group of photographers who lived and worked in New York City during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s" and who, although disinclined to commit themselves to any group or belief, "shared a number of influences, aesthetic assumptions, subjects, and stylistic earmarks". Livingston writes that their work was marked by humanism, a tough-minded style, photojournalistic techniques, the influence of film noir and the photographers Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson; and that it avoided "the anecdotal descriptiveness of most photojournalism" and the egoism of American action painting, and indeed that it was remarkably little influenced by contemporary painting or graphic design (even though a number