Framing the City: Photographs from the Permanent Collection

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June 5 - August 19, 2018

Special Exhibitions Gallery, first floor

Photographers have long turned their cameras on the city, often framing its architecture and residents from unexpected vantage points and perspectives. Featuring views of soaring skyscrapers as well as serendipitous encounters on busy streets, Framing the City offered snapshots of people, goods, and culture in flux. Slick surfaces of glass and steel, though dazzling at street level and from afar, contrast with gritty images of industrial labor. Immigrants and other minority groups populated many of the frames, highlighting diverse life experiences that unfold and intertwine within the fabric of urban life.

 

Framing the City charted numerous waves of documentary photography following the example set in the early 1900s by Lewis Hine and, soon thereafter, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, and Frank Paulin. Photographs by Alexander Rodchenko, Andy Warhol, Neal Slavin, Larry Fink, Donald Camp, and Bill Jacobson were among the thirty some works on view, carrying forward and capturing the impulse to frame the city and its inhabitants well into the twentieth century.

 

Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art.