Dulwich Gallery Hosts Century of American City Photography
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- Dulwich Picture Gallery is hosting "Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography" until 4 October — only the second photography exhibition in the gallery's history
- The exhibition exclusively presents works from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection, a curatorial limitation the review notes, featuring photographers including Stieglitz, Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Richard Avedon, and Weegee
- A 44-second film clip of San Francisco's White Angel soup kitchen from 1931, set to an upbeat swing soundtrack, shows a lively community presided over by a jovial matron — a jarring contrast to the grim loneliness of Lange's iconic Depression-era photograph
- Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document reflects the influence of his friendships with abstract expressionists Rothko and Kline, searching Harlem's torn posters and peeling paint for a new photographic language for social protest
- Roy DeCarava's Hallway — a photograph of an empty corridor in a Harlem tenement lit by a single lightbulb — finds richness and volumetric complexity in the color black, recreating the claustrophobia of standing in that space
- Bruce Davidson's 1980s Leica shots of New York's graffiti-covered subway trains close the show, capturing city life colliding across culture, age, race, and class beneath crimson sunset skies
Why it matters: By drawing exclusively from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection — a curatorial limitation the review flags — the show sharpens its thematic focus on first- and second-generation European immigrant photographers who constructed the American urban visual language, from pictorialist pioneers through Davidson's 1980s subway shots.
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