A Life with Others: An Imagined Retrospective
City / 2
It seems no coincidence that the sixties were also the decade in which street photography ascended to the top tier of art photography in America, emblematized in the epochal 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Curated by John Szarkowski—or perhaps more accurately, organized as a chapter in a career-long curatorial argument about the practice of photography as art—the exhibition featured the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. It not only introduced these photographers to wide audiences for the first time, but effectively christened them as the leading photographers of their generation, the true heirs of photographic modernism, and so photographers of historical consequence. Their métier was careful, unscripted observation with handheld cameras, a reclamation of the documentary form for what Szarkowski called “more personal ends. . . not to reform life, but to know it.”
( All four images are presented together as 42x30’’ on tyvek to be mounted to gatorboard. )