Open City - Street Photographs Since 1950

Open City brings together the work of nineteen artists, to examine the work of street photographers over the course of the last half-century. It takes as its starting point the raw and edgy photographs produced by a generation of photographers in the 1950s and '60s. Artists such as Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Klein and Garry Winogrand were instrumental in the development of a radical new approach to documentary photography, aided by the increasingly portable cameras used. For these and subsequent artists, the street has continued to hold an inherent fascination as a theatre of human activity. Open City reflects the diversity of the work that this has stimulated, ranging from Terence Donovan's advertising and fashion photography to Susan Meisela's photographs of war-torn areas of Nicaragua, and Raghubir Singh's vibrant and colorful images of his native India. Now considered one of the key tools of the photographer, the legitimacy of color photography as an artform has only recently been recognised. William Eggleston is seen as one of the artists responsible for archieving this in the late 1970s. Open City also includes the work from a newer generation of artists, such as Wolfgang Tillmans, and examines the way in which contemporary practice continues to react to, and develop on, the tradition of the street photograph.

The photographers: Nobuyoshi Araki, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Terence Donovan, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nigel Henderson, William Klein, Nikki S. Lee, Susan Meiselas, Daido Moriyama, Catherine Opie, Allan Sekula, Raghubir Singh, Beat Streuli, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, Garry Winogrand.

Exhibition Schedule: Museum of Modern Art Oxford 2001 • The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester 2001-2002 • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC 2002