"Street Seen : The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959"
2010-01-30 until 2010-04-25
Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee, WI, USA

A unique and pivotal moment in American photographic history will be explored in STREET SEEN: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959 on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum from January 30 through April 25, 2010. With over 100 images, the exhibition focuses on the work of six important photographers - Lisette Model, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, and William Klein - and is the first major examination of street photography of the 1940s and 50s in nearly 20 years. Refuting the common claim that photojournalism was the only significant photographic activity at the time, Street Seen uncovers a crucial time in American art, when global media was in its adolescence and photography was just beginning to achieve recognition in the contemporary art world. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

By concentrating on six photographers working in New York City whose radical aesthetic sensibility re-oriented viewers to America's rapidly changing social landscape, the exhibition provides new insight into an exciting time, when the photographic medium and American society were both at a cultural crossroads. Several overlapping influences defined the era: avant-garde and popular culture; personal and commercial photography; Depression-era social realism and Modernist abstract painting; wartime scarcity and postwar consumerism; and Allied internationalism and Cold War paranoia. The exhibition provides an in-depth look at how these photographers negotiated these conditions to make extraordinary photographs.

The graphically charged and emotionally engaging photographs in STREET SEEN: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959 propose spontaneity and subjective experience as the primary forces in creative expression. Among the highlights are Lisette Model's unflinching look at the cacophony of the urban environment; Louis Faurer's empathic portraits of unglamorous eccentrics in Times Square; Ted Croner's haunting night images; Saul Leiter's painterly glimpses of elusive moments; William Klein's graphic, confrontational style; and Robert Frank's documentation of American ideals gone awry. The exhibition also includes work by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt and Weegee, among others, to demonstrate how the six major photographers were informed by the legacy of documentary photography and photojournalism, but ultimately differed significantly from their predecessors and contemporaries.

STREET SEEN examines the years between 1940 (when Model's photographs were reproduced for the first time in America) and 1959 (the publication date of the American edition of Frank's The Americans). The six artists' exceptionally potent photographs are presented as cases in point, representing what might be called "archetypes of possibility" in creative photography at the time, forging a path between the humanism of 1930s documentary photography and the expressive panache of experimental abstract photography.

"Abstract Expressionism, film noir, and Beat poetry are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II, but the significance of creative photography during the immediate postwar period has largely been ignored," notes Lisa Hostetler, Curator of Photographs, Milwaukee Art Museum.

As Hostetler writes in the exhibition catalogue, "These photographers treated their medium as an art form, eschewing mainstream stylistic categories (documentary, photojournalism, fashion) in favor of evoking personal experience and the emotive power of picture-making. The street becomes a metaphor for modern society; their photographs, the remnants of confrontation between the individual and the metropolis that echo a basic psychological process that of constructing a sense of self and a distinctive identity in an increasingly anonymous world."

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Wisconsin

Other Important Exhibitions in United States