Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Street Life

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Inspired by progressive politics and the advent of portable high-speed cameras, early-twentieth-century photographers took to the streets. They focused their lenses on ordinary city dwellers and cast off the artificial conventions of studio photography in favor of spontaneous expression, resulting in a new genre of street portraits. The works in this gallery span the twentieth century with a concentration on the 1940s to the 1960s, when urban documentary photography was at its height. Among the pioneering photographers of the mid-century years were Walker Evans, Louis Faurer, and Helen Levitt, who redefined traditional portrait photography by depicting anonymous figures in poetic moments of happenstance that lent their images the specificity of portraiture. The generation that followed, including Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, pushed this informality even further, capturing “found” subjects with a snapshot aesthetic tinged with Pop nonchalance. Yet some artists and critics saw the practice of photographing individuals without their consent as potentially voyeuristic or exploitative, and by the 1980s photographers such as Dawoud Bey and Jamel Shabazz had embraced a more collaborative approach, actively staging images with their subjects.

Below is a selection of works from Street Life.

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NEW YORK, 1997

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), New York, 1997. Chromogenic print mounted on four-ply board, 29 7/8 × 39 7/8 in., sheet (75.9 × 101.3 cm); image: 25 1/8 × 375 1/2 in (63.8 × 953.8 cm); mount: 29 7/8 × 39 7/8 × 1/16 in. (75.9 × 101.3 × 0.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner P.2011.102. © Philip-Lorca DiCorcia Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

This work (and the one adjacent to it) belongs to a series in which Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed strangers as they walked through Times Square. He took the images using a long-range telephoto lens and employed a radioactivated strobe light, which was precisely synced with the shutter of his camera so that it dramatically illuminated his subjects while remaining invisible in daylight. The businessman depicted here was thus an unwitting participant in his own portrait despite the image’s appearance as having been highly staged. In this way, diCorcia’s Headsoverturn the traditional dichotomies of street photography, fusing documentary spontaneity with cinematic control.

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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