黑料不打烊

During and immediately after World War II, a distinctly subjective edge sliced through the work of a number of artists. A constellation of events鈥攖he war, the exposure of the Holocaust, the deployment of the atomic bomb, and the onset of the Cold War鈥攎ade psychological experience a salient subject in America. Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism emerged in response to the war鈥檚 shocking realities, which were increasingly depicted in the mass media through photographs. The 35mm camera鈥攊ntroduced in the 1920s鈥攊naugurated a revolution in photojournalism that thrust viewers onto the front lines of the war and its aftermath. The graphic intensity and urgent drama of these pictures had a lasting impact that resonated throughout postwar culture. Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940鈥�1959 breaks new ground in the study of American art and culture during the World War II era, refuting the common claim that photojournalism was the only significant photographic activity at the time.

Model, Faurer, Croner, Leiter, Klein, and Frank embraced photography as an 鈥渁ct of living鈥濃�攁n exploration of identity rather than a tool for telling a story.

Street Seen features over 100 photographs, as well as a select group of short, non-narrative films, paintings, and drawings. It highlights six photographers鈥�Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank鈥攚hose imagery encapsulates the period鈥檚 most notable aesthetic achievements. The exhibition celebrates each photographer鈥檚 unconventional artistic vision, while acknowledging the challenges they faced in pursuing careers as independent creative photographers between 1940 and 1959.

Model, Faurer, Croner, Leiter, Klein, and Frank embraced photography as an 鈥渁ct of living鈥濃�攁n exploration of identity rather than a tool for telling a story. They treated their medium as an art form, eschewing mainstream stylistic categories (e.g., documentary, photojournalism, fashion) and breaking the rules of conventional photographic technique to explore the nature of individuality in a rapidly changing, impersonal social environment. Their images, rooted in everyday urban life, are grounded in a photographic sensibility derived from the trauma of the war years and propose spontaneity and subjective experience as the primary forces in creative expression. Like contemporaneous action painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, Model, Faurer, Croner, Leiter, Klein, and Frank emphasized the visceral activity of making a picture and confronted the viewer with the material presence of their photographs. In demonstrating a perceivable link between form and feeling, the photographs in Street Seen manifest what is termed the 鈥減sychological gesture鈥� of mid-century American life.