Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography

The ubiquity of camera phones today has very much made all the world a stage. In the modern city, photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street. Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous. “Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography” explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has played out in populous urban spaces—from Harlem and Los Angeles to Tokyo and Istanbul—over five decades. Photographs from the 1970s through the ’90s by the likes of Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, Stephen Shore, and Yolanda Andrade appear alongside more recent work by artists such as Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, Zoe Strauss, and Martin Parr. These images create a compelling visual conversation that encourages visitors to consider developments in photography as well as changes in cities and societies at large.