Cityscape Photography – professional photographers capture the US cityscape in all its detail, vanity and glory | Art and design

This – only the second exhibition of art in the history of Dulwich Picture Gallery – is a quietly thoughtful but effective exhibition that explores two overlapping phenomena: the construction of modern urban spaces and the language of photography.

Focusing on works from the most famous artists of the 20th century that were created in cities across the US, it is a brief overview that begins with the pioneers of painting in New York, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and continues through the art, starting with the first examples of social photography – Dorothea Mother Migrants and Angels of the Whites Himble by Dorothea Mireadline and Angels Himble by Lewis. photo of master metalworker Victor “Frenchy” Gosselin working on the Empire State Building.

All the greats are here: Ilse Bing, Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Richard Avedon, among others. This is because the show is a strange beast: it presents the services of the DNB Savings Bank Foundation. This means that curatorial options are limited.

A series of short film clips provide further interpretations. The 44-second video of the White Angel kitchen in San Francisco in 1931, where Lange’s timeless Great Depression portrait was created, provides a stark contrast to the place and the bleak loneliness depicted in the photo. To the sound of the song, we see a merry band led by a jovial matron who distributes food and arranges clothes with a smile.

Most of the artists in the first part of the exhibition were trained as painters, and they show a respectful attention to design and light. Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document shows the influence of his relationships with Rothko and Kline, delving into Harlem’s torn-up billboards and painting a style that created a new visual language for public demonstrations.

From the Great Depression to the New Order, urban infrastructure, regeneration and optimism soon took a turn for the worse. Images of independent figures against the size of the city come back – Louis Faurer’s 1949 Looking at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center says it all – an unknown man in a fedora looks at the building, the powerful one fills the entire frame.

At night, the city’s conflicts rise to the surface, and all the surprises come out. The main points are the images that delight in this, such as Weegee’s terrifying, dramatic images of New York after dark, showing murders, tragic accidents and the odd moments that the city can produce – a man’s face, eyes closed, emerging from one another in a city street; the large clock in the background draws your eye into the inky shades.

There is a simple genius work by Roy DeCarava. Hallway is a picture of an empty barn in a house in Harlem, similar to the one the artist grew up in. It is dimly lit by a single bulb, almost completely swallowed by the shadows, while the lines of the walls draw your eye in and down. DeCarava’s claustrophobic image makes you feel like standing in that place. They find richness and expression in a dark, complex, volumetric and varied color like no other.

The entire exhibition also tells the American story of the city – almost all the artists here are first or second European immigrants. It also shows how photography became a way for artists to deal with the rich culture of the city, trying to capture it, to make themselves – or try, like Garry Winogrand, not to enter it completely, to come close to “not existing” as the photographer described his process, words that were emphasized on the wall of the exhibition. Cityscape is about the number of silent but beautiful moments that happen every day – like Peter Hujar’s Richie, stopping to reflect for a second on a New York street at night, raindrops glistening on the windshield of a car.

We pass through the 60’s and 70’s, where the hair grows more and the politics are more complicated, and we end up on the subway, captured by a Leica shot in the 1980’s that Bruce Davidson made on the graffiti trains of New York. Here we are walking again, in a place where city life is divided by culture, age, race and class. People go to festivals, to work, to sleep, to fall in love, to fight. The red light of the sky at sunset makes the containers look beautiful and bright. The train still moves. And the unstoppable city is still moving madly, mercilessly.