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With over 100 images, the exhibition focuses on the work of six important photographers–-Lisette Model, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, and William Klein–-and is the first major examination of street photography of the 1940s and ‘50s in nearly 20 years.  Refuting the common claim that photojournalism was the only significant photographic activity at the time, Street Seen uncovers a crucial time in American art, when global media was in its adolescence and photography was just beginning to achieve recognition in the contemporary art world.  A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

By concentrating on six photographers working in New York City whose radical aesthetic sensibility re-oriented viewers to America’s rapidly changing social landscape, the exhibition provides new insight into an exciting time, when the photographic medium and American society were both at a cultural crossroads.  Several overlapping influences defined the era:  avant-garde and popular culture; personal and commercial photography; Depression-era social realism and Modernist abstract painting; wartime scarcity and postwar consumerism; Allied internationalism and Cold War paranoia.  The exhibition provides an in-depth look at how photographers negotiated such conditions to make extraordinary photographs.

The graphically charged and emotionally engaging photographs in STREET SEEN: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959 propose spontaneity and subjective experience as the primary forces in creative expression.  Among the highlights are Lisette Model’s unflinching look at the cacophony of the urban environment; Louis Faurer’s empathic portraits of unglamorous eccentrics in Times Square; Ted Croner’s haunting night images; Saul Leiter’s painterly glimpses of elusive moments; William Klein’s graphic, confrontational style; and Robert Frank’s documentation of American ideals gone awry.  The exhibition also includes work by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt and Weegee, among others, to demonstrate how the six major photographers were informed by the legacy of documentary photography and photojournalism, but ultimately differed significantly from their predecessors and contemporaries.

STREET SEEN examines the years between 1940 (when Model’s photographs were reproduced for the first time in America) and 1959 (the publication date of the American edition of Frank's The Americans).  The six artists’ exceptionally potent photographs are presented as cases in point, representing what might be called “archetypes of possibility” in creative photography at the time.  They forged a path between the humanism of 1930s documentary photography and the expressive panache of experimental abstract photography.

Abstract Expressionism, film noir, and Beat poetry are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II, but the significance of creative photography during the immediate postwar period has largely been ignored,” notes Lisa Hostetler, Curator of Photographs, Milwaukee Art Museum.

As Hostetler writes in the exhibition catalogue, “These photographers treated their medium as an art form, eschewing mainstream stylistic categories (documentary, photojournalism, fashion) in favor of evoking personal experience and the emotive power of picture-making.  The street becomes a metaphor for modern society; their photographs, the remnants of confrontation between the individual and the metropolis that echo a basic psychological process—that of constructing a sense of self and a distinctive identity in an increasingly anonymous world.”

PAINTING, DRAWINGS, AND FILM

STREET SEEN: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography includes paintings and drawings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Franz Kline to demonstrate the correspondence in sensibility and approach between the painters and photographers of the time.  In addition, several films will accompany the exhibition including William Klein’s first film, Broadway by Light, 1958, and the premier of Louis Faurer’s Time Capsule, 1940s-60s, which was recently discovered and has never been shown to the public.

BACKGROUND

World War II and its aftermath ushered in a new era of artistic expression.  In the space of a couple of decades, photography had documented the consequences of the Depression, transported the harsh reality of war back to the home front, disclosed the Holocaust, and witnessed the dawn of the nuclear age.  These events and their images engendered a tacit anxiety that was visible in many areas of popular culture, including the introduction of existential ideas into common parlance.  As the New York intellectual Mary McCarthy noted about the outlook among artists and writers of the late 1940s and ‘50s, “[we] were all taken, more or less, with the existentialists.”  In response, creative photographers broke the rules of conventional photographic technique to evoke personal experience in an increasingly anonymous world.