In 1929, the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York after several years in Paris, said Seán O’Hagan in The Observer, and “found her home city in the throes of rapid transformation”. As “a new architecture of skyscrapers and towering urban canyons” altered Manhattan, she began work on an “epic” project to document the changing metropolis. She had already sensed that photography was the medium with which to capture the “urban dynamic” of the 20th century.
In 1928, she had asked: “How can anyone but a photographer hope today to fix for posterity the image of the modern city?” And that is a question that “echoes through” “Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography”, at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery. Bringing together works by US photographers from the 1900s to the 1980s, it is in fact “a portrait of several American cities”, from Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era San Francisco, to “the blankly intriguing streets” of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles in the 1960s. It is not a complete survey, but it’s nevertheless a fabulous show that “just about adds up to a visual narrative of an American century”.
This “quietly contemplative but gripping” exhibition includes works by “era-defining photographers” drawn from the collection of Norway’s Savings Bank Foundation DNB, said Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian – which inevitably limits the curatorial choice. It begins with images of New York and its towering monoliths by the great pioneers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and then just keeps moving “through masterpieces”. Lange’s “Migrant Mother” (1936) is among the examples of early social documentary on show. There is also Lewis Hine’s iron worker on the Empire State Building, circa 1930.
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Many of the photographers in the first half had trained as painters, which shows in their “glorious attentiveness to composition and light”. And, while you feel that some were trying to deal with the overwhelming vastness of the new American city by making pieces of it their own, others – such as the street photographer Garry Winogrand – disappear into it.
Upbeat and “unashamedly nostalgic”, the exhibition is full of striking imagery, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Look out, among many other things, for Steichen’s “The Maypole” (1932), which brilliantly conveys the excitement and vast presence of the Empire State Building, and for the film about Saul Leiter, that “unsung chronicler of mid-century American uncertainty”, who turned his poetic and painterly outsider’s eye on life in the East Village. “‘I may be old-fashioned,’ he said, ‘but I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.’ Bravo to that, and to the spirit of pleasure throughout this show.”
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21. Until 4 October
