Exhibit of the week: Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959

Milwaukee Art Museum, through April 25

American street photography was more or less invented in the 1940s, said Angelina Krahn in the Milwaukee Shepherd Express. “With the advent of portable, 35-millimeter cameras,” for the first time it became possible for photographers to catch their fellow Americans off-guard—and capture them as they actually were. And how were they? Anxious, for the most part, troubled by the distant dangers of World War II and, later, the Cold War. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new exhibition of works by Lisette Model, Robert Frank, and other photographers from the era thus “offers a welcome counterpoint to the rose-colored, whitewashed nostalgia” perpetuated by commercial photographs from that time.

It does more than that, said Mary Louise Schumacher in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “This show breaks important new ground in our understanding of life and culture in mid-century America.” Louis Faurer took photographs of vulnerable, marginalized figures wearing once-fine suits—“a metaphor for the psychological wear and tear of modern life.” William Klein captured a stern-looking group of Christmas shoppers outside Macy’s in New York. He shot them “slightly from below, so they loom ominously.” Model also used a low vantage point in her “Running Legs” series, which shows disembodied legs rushing past partially obscured urban scenes. Looking at them, “we’re injected into the unrelenting stampede of urban life,” and thrown off-balance by the blurry, disorienting images. Model wasn’t the only one of these artists willing to sacrifice clarity for energy: You can hardly make out the faces in Ted Croner’s “grainy and blown out” pictures of people trudging through Times Square, while Saul Leiter’s color images often omit people entirely, “drawing us directly into a thicket of urban particulars—traffic lights, wet streets, taxicabs, dirty windows.”

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The best of these artists’ images fairly burst with life, said David Kennedy Jones in The New York Times. Klein “celebrated the grain and grit of blurry action shots, and the haunted forms of the midnight urban landscape.” Leiter and Model found a way to fuse a compositional style learned from avant-garde abstraction with the “intrepid candor of wartime photojournalism.” Yet the images that most haunt you after you’ve left the exhibit are the understated, somewhat conventionally composed photographs of Robert Frank. One Frank photo captures white children and a black man staring out the windows of a segregated New Orleans trolley car. Another shows a diner worker, exhausted, on a stool. Together with the other images in this exhibition, they form “an essential catalog of the American experience.”