Street Level: Modern Photography from the Smart Museum Collection
June 17 – September 7, 2008
Nathan Lerner, Cigar Store, 1934, Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of Joel Snyder, 1981.86.
In the early twentieth century, a number of photographers turned their cameras to their immediate environment, finding subjects in the everyday imagery and visual clamor of the streets in modern cities like Chicago, Moscow, New York, and Paris.
Presented as objective and mechanical representations of ordinary urban life, these "straight" or "pure" photographs were in fact often inflected with other aesthetic and social concerns. In capturing daily city life, some photographers produced abstract and dislocating views of vast urban architecture, while others depicted much more intimate, narrative scenes of abject poverty.
With photographs by Walker Evans, Georgy Zelma, Nathan Lerner, and Paul Strand, among others, this exhibition of works from the Smart Museum collection looks at the modern city as seen from the street.