Open City: Street Photographs since 1950

by Kerry Brougher, Nobuyoshi Araki, Wolfgang Tillmans

Street photography has a long and varied history, encompassing such artists as Walker Evans from the 1930s, Robert Frank from the 1950s, and Garry Winogrand from the 1970s, each of whom, along with other practitioners, siezed the medium as their own and extended it, creating something new. Open City brings together the work of 19 artists to examine the history of street photography over the course of the last half-century. It takes as its starting point photographers such as Lee Friedlander and William Klein, who were instrumental in the development of a radical new approach to documentary photography, aided by the increasing portablility of camera equipment. For these and subsequent artists, the street has continued to hold an inherent fascination as a theater of human activity. Open City reflects the diversity of the work stimulated by this from Terry Donovan's advertising and fashion photography, to Susan Meiselas's photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and Raghubir Singh's vibrant and colorful images of his native India. Color, now considered a key tool for photographers, has only in recent years been legitimized, in part thanks to the work of American photographer William Eggleston during the late 1970s. Open City also includes the work of a newer generation of photographers, including the Turner Prize-winning Wolfgang Tillmans, and examines the the way in which contemporary practice continues to react to and build upon the tradition of street photography.

Genres: Photography

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2001