Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, the second photography exhibition in Dulwich Picture Gallery's history, presents a quietly contemplative but gripping show tracing two intersecting developments: the construction of the modern urban environment and the language of photography.
Focusing exclusively on works from era-defining 20th-century photographers made in cities across the US, it's a concise overview that begins with pictorialist pioneers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. It moves through early social documentary photography, including Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and White Angel Breadline, and Lewis Hine's portrait of high-steel ironworker Victor 'Frenchy' Gosselin working on the Empire State Building.
All the Greats
Ilse Bing, Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Richard Avedon, and others are included. The show exclusively presents works from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection, limiting curatorial choices.
A series of short film pieces offer other interpretations. A 44-second clip of the White Angel soup kitchen in San Francisco in 1931, where Lange's Great Depression image was made, reveals a lively community rather than the grim loneliness depicted in the photograph.
Influence of Painting
Many photographers in the first part trained as painters, shown in their attentiveness to composition and light. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document reflects his friendships with Rothko and Kline, using Harlem's torn posters and peeling paint for abstract expression and social protest.
Images of solitary figures against the immensity of the city recur, such as Louis Faurer's 1949 Looking at the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, where an anonymous figure in a fedora looks toward the towering building.
Night and Tension
At night, the city's tensions rise. Weegee's sensationalist snapshots of New York after dark depict murders, accidents, and odd moments—like a face jutting from a column, with a clock in the background.
Roy DeCarava's Hallway photographs an empty corridor in a Harlem tenement, lit dimly by a single lightbulb, nearly swallowed by shadows. The image conveys the claustrophobia of that space, finding richness in the color black.
American Narrative
The exhibition retells the American narrative of the city; almost all photographers are first- or second-generation European immigrants. It shows how photography became a way to deal with the overwhelming city—to take hold of it or, as Garry Winogrand described, to disappear into it completely, coming closer to 'not existing.'
Peter Hujar's 1985 Richie captures a figure reflecting in the rain on a New York street, raindrops glimmering on a car windscreen.
Subway and Motion
Moving through the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition concludes with Bruce Davidson's 1980s Leica shots on New York's graffiti-covered subway trains. There, city life collides across culture, age, race, and class. People go to celebrations, work, fall asleep, fall in love, fight. The crimson light of sunset bathes the carriages in a beautiful glow. The train keeps moving, and the unstoppable city remains in maddening, merciless motion.
Portrait of the City: A Century of American Photography is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 4 October.
