Every Picture Tells a Story: New York in Photography

JULY 6, 2010

In a town where the most hurried snapshot can look like a postcard, the images that burn brightest in our minds are the ones that catch the city at its most personal.

When thinking of New York in photos, it’s hard not to imagine those New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam, caught by the lens of photojournalist Charles C. Ebbets in 1932. Then there’s the Alfred Eisenstaedt Life Magazine cover showing a delirious V-J Day kiss.

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, currently on view at MoMA. No discussion of important New York photography would exist without mention of Berenice Abbott. Her photos of the city in the 1930s in Changing New York provide an immediate sense of both place and change. Native New Yorker Diane Arbus—arguably among the 20th century’s most influential artists—found her best subjects in her hometown, and Nan Goldin illuminated the seamy underside of downtown counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s.

The unblinking lens of the man known as Weegee is best known for introducing the gritty realities of the Lower East Side during the ’30s and ’40s. Walker Evans was another photojournalist with an unwavering eye for the real—some of his most compelling images show nameless subjects moving through daily life on sooty subways. Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York is more a swan song for a vanishing village than a paean to tall buildings, but it captures the spirit of the mom-and-pop stores and newcomers’ successes upon which modern-day New York City was built.

ALSO IN NEW YORK CITY INSIDER

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Every Picture Tells a Story: New York in Photography

JULY 6, 2010

ALSO IN NEW YORK CITY INSIDER

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