Observations: Street Photography from the Permanent Collection
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Selected from the Museum’s permanent collection, Observations brings together a collection of photographs that map the social landscape of the street. As an aesthetic category, street photography emerged in the 1930s and began to flourish in the Post-War period with artists like Robert Frank and Diane Arbus capturing the quiet intricacies of rural and urban America. Throughout this history, the category developed around questions of classification and whether street photography offered objective documentation or was infused with the photographer’s individual style. With careful cropping and decisive shots, the photographs featured in this exhibition trend toward the latter, with each work by each artist making clear the uniqueness of his or her eye. Upon closer inspection of these photographs, the banality of the street fades while the delicate traces of human lives and behaviors come into focus. From children playing on an abandoned mattress and a boy sitting alone to streets brought to life with the collective harmonies of people gathering and a man surrounded by onlookers in a game of chess, the photographs in Observations reveal a nuanced compendium of everyday life. When taken together, every perspective and frame demands careful attention, as if helping us see people and lives we could not see otherwise.