Exhibit of the week: Zoe Strauss: Ten Years

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through April 22

First the underpass, now the city, said Stephan Salisbury in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Eleven years ago, artist Zoe Strauss began exhibiting photographs of her South Philly neighbors beneath a section of Interstate 95 that cuts through the impoverished neighborhood. Her annual open-air shows were instantly popular, drawing international attention to her work, despite the fact that she didn’t even own a camera until 2000. This month, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a midcareer retrospective in its galleries and supplemented the well-earned show by plastering blown-up Strauss prints on 54 billboards citywide. It’s a fitting celebration of a woman who just might be “the ultimate street photographer.” Every image is evidence of an artist “engaged with her surroundings at all times” and possessed of a “great gift of empathy.” She seems to find the dignity in everyday human struggle wherever she looks.

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Clearly, the 41-year-old Strauss “has accomplished more in the past decade than many artists do in a lifetime,” said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. In her portraiture, strangers bear their wounds—black eyes, gunshot injuries, a hysterectomy scar—with an honesty that’s ennobling. Her subjects’ damaged bodies meanwhile “come to seem inseparable from the graffitied walls, scratched windows, and stained pavement” in her photographs of neighborhood architecture. Though she’s taken her compassionate eye to other cities, she’s best on her home turf: buttonholing new subjects outside the local bodegas, catching kids doing flips off decrepit mattresses tossed onto the street. At the museum, the 170 prints on display can seem too much of a good thing—the exhibit has a cramped feel. Luckily, you can catch the full power of her images out on the streets.

The billboards are the perfect medium for an artist dedicated to bringing art to new audiences, said John Vettese in the Philadelphia City Paper. At 10th and Reed, Antoinette Conti (2001), a loving portrait of a stern neighborhood matriarch, “keeps a watchful eye over the intersection.” Near 30th Street stands an image of decaying homes at the site of a deadly 1985 confrontation between a radical group and city police. Especially at the museum, where images depicting wounds and substance abuse are more prevalent, there’s “an undeniable element of shock” to Strauss’s work. But “if that’s all there was, her art would not be so revered.” Her connection to her subjects allows certain images to emit “a tone of wonderment.” In fact, some of Strauss’s everyday people are “rendered glamorous” by her lens.