Common
Ground: Photographers on the Street
October 17 – December 14, 2003
Slater Concourse Gallery
Photographers on the Street brings together twenty-two
photographs that inventively examine and record commonplace events,
people, and objects.
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.
The first section of the exhibition captures the streets of New
York City, from the 1960s and 1970s, in the black and white photographs
of Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz and Lee Friedlander. Each illustrates
the flux of public life, its subtleties as well as its theatrics.
Images, taken quickly and seemingly randomly, contain biting social
commentary, humor, incoherence, and sometimes unexpected clarity.
Compositions often bordering on the chaotic introduce multiple points
of interest that at once disorient and compel 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. They
look to the street for inspiration, extracting the unreal from reality
and beauty from the dismal.
Curated by Naomi Blumberg, this exhibition was organized by the
McMullen Museum of Art with loans from the Tufts University Gallery
and the photographers: Roswell Angier, Alice Attie, Melanie Einzig,
Travis Huggett, Constantine Manos, Sylvia Plachy, Gus Powell, and
Alex Webb.
— by Curator Naomi Blumberg,
McMullen Museum of Art
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