He was there and he wasn't there--a magic act that gives these photos an innocent look. Oddly, even the ones in which people pose deliberately have that same quality--as if the subjects had rigged a shutter, then had run around in front of the camera. The black-and-white itself--to return to that subject--aids Bentley's own unobtrusiveness. If color is the new journalism of photography, in which the photographer's presence is always loudly proclaimed, black-and-white is the old journalism, in which the photographer disappears, and things speak for themselves.
