Dulwich Picture Gallery
£14.50
This is a summer when all the romance has been scorched off city life, as successive heat waves make tower blocks suffocate and pavements burn. Even in oh-so-pretty Paris, the city’s whimsical iron railings are suddenly looking more like prison bars. High-density living is dangerous, as our forebears well knew. Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition follows some of the biggest names in 20th century American photography as they document their country’s major cities, and reckon with its fearsome urge to build upwards and outwards. It’s full of iconic shots that don’t quite build into one towering narrative.
Today, New York’s skyline is so familiar that it adorns film credits, baseball caps, and the walls of thousands of crappy Airbnbs the world over. But for the photographers who watched it being built, its heights were unexpected – unnatural, even. Berenice Abbott’s 1933 image ‘Exchange Place, New York’ is four times taller than it is wide – its vertiginous blocks seem to press together, about to crush the ant-like figures scurrying at street level. For her contemporary, Edward Streichen, this new New York is the stuff of sci-fi fantasies: in ‘The Maypole (The Empire State Building)’, he uses double exposure to turn this well-known landmark into an alien cross-hatching of lines, dizzying and unsettling. Photography – a new artistic discipline – was rising up alongside the city, and the possibilities felt endless.
“Edward Streichen’s New York is the stuff of sci-fi fantasies”
While some photographers trained their cameras upwards, others focused on the ordinary people living in the shadow of these tower blocks. It’s refreshing to see how empowering some of these images are. Viennese-born photographer Lisette Model went on to tutor legendary portrait photographer Diane Arbus: there’s a striking modernity to Model’s ‘Coney Island Bather, New York City’ (1939-41), which shows a sturdy woman squatting in front of the waves, grinning into the distance, totally resisting any pressure to perform femininity for the camera. Arbus’s own ‘Woman with white gloves and fancy hat, NYC.’(1963) is a highlight, its defiant subject wearing her flowered headgear like a helmet, and holding her hands like boxing mitts. Similarly, Helen Levitt's photos of Harlem street life decide against mawkish social commentary in favour of capturing little human moments in this poverty-stricken melting pot: in ‘New York’ (1972), kids play with gestures that are so animated and tantalisingly opaque that you hardly notice the graffiti-covered boarded-up shops behind them, or the rubbish on the ground.
This exhibition is roughly chronological, starting in the early 1900s and culminating with Bruce Davidson’s moody, cinematic 1980s shots of New York subway scenes. But because all its images are drawn from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection of American photography, they don't always combine into a clear throughline. Portrait of a City departs from its theme to display classics like Dorothea Lange’s careworn portrait of rural poverty, ‘Migrant Mother’ (1936), or Margaret Bourke-White’s graphic studies of roadside sellers in Georgia (1936), surrounded by graffiti-like lists of their wares.
Ultimately, there’s a slightly overwhelming quality to this exhibition: the walls are covered in potted biographies, in who's who of US photography, many of them represented by just one or two images. It’s telling so many stories at once. But that means that everyone who visits will find something to delight in, as they pull out faces from a crowd of varied, jostling, unsettling perspectives on American life.
