Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Street Life

Street Life

Floor 7

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.

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.

Inspired by the vibrant street life and youth culture of his native Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz used his camera to capture the social conditions of the borough during the 1970s and 1980s. Shabazz recalled that this image was taken in Brownsville, a neighborhood plagued by poverty and gang violence, after he “came upon this group of young acrobats performing incredible feats on an old beat-up mattress.” The photograph, he explained, “represents the hardships that inner city youth face each day of their lives trying to overcome obstacles and is representative of the lack of resources. Despite it all they still find a way to remain resilient and creative.”