Common Ground: Photographers on the Street
June 11–September 7, 2003
Melanie Einzig, Tourists, 2002
This exhibition focuses on the photographer’s fascination with the street.
From the medium’s inception in the nineteenth century, photographers have
looked to this public venue as a source of inexhaustible visual material. Common
Ground: Photographers on the Street brings together twenty-two photographs
that inventively examine and record commonplace events, people, and objects.
The beginning of the exhibition captures the streets of New York City, from
the 1960s and ‘70s, in black and white photographs by Garry Winogrand,
Joel Meyerowitz and Lee Friedlander. Each photographer illustrates in a different
way the flux of public life—its subtleties as well as its theatrics. Images,
taken quickly and sometimes randomly, are filled with biting social commentary,
humorous scenes, incoherence and, sometimes, unexpected clarity. Compositions
often border on the chaotic, introducing multiple vignettes that at once disorient
and invite a closer look.
The second section of the exhibition is devoted to contemporary street photographers,
a group less often examined in the museum setting. Although aesthetically rooted
in the classic street tradition, these photographers take provocative and insightful
detours. Cameras always in hand, they look to the street for inspiration, extracting
beauty from the ordinary.
Constantine Manos, Los Angeles, CA, 2001, courtesy of the artist
Curated by Naomi Blumberg, this exhibition was organized by the McMullen Museum
of Art with loans from the Tufts University Gallery
and eight contemporary photographers.
Photographers: Roswell Angier, Alice Attie, Melanie Einzig, Travis Huggett,
Constantine Manos, Sylvia Plachy, Gus Powell, and Alex Webb.