American City Life and the Influential Photographers Who Captured It

Starting from the early 1900s, a brand new exhibition paperwork the speedy growth of city life within the United States via the eyes of an important photographers from the twentieth century.

Dulwich Picture Gallery in London is internet hosting solely its second-ever pictures exhibition, and this one charts American cities as they shifted via many years of profound social, cultural, and financial change.

Titled Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, the exhibition options photographers together with Diane Arbus, Lewis Hine, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and lots of extra. All of the works belong to the DNB Savings Bank Foundation assortment.

The exhibition opens within the early 1900s, a second when American cities expanded quickly via mass immigration, industrial progress, and new types of labor — drawing photographers to websites of social and financial shift.

After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, pictures took on an pressing social position, recording mass unemployment, poverty, and migration. The exhibition then turns to artists documenting the dramatic bodily modifications reshaping American cities within the mid‑twentieth century.

Moving into the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, the exhibition explores how photographers responded to a nation present process cultural and political transformation.

Portrait of a City concludes with a presentation of Bruce Davidson’s famend Subway sequence, 1980–85, whose vivid, unflinching pictures seize the variety, individuality, and uncooked immediacy of New York life, a permanent hallmark of the photographer’s profession.

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery July 28 – October 4, 2026. Presented in partnership with Savings Bank Foundation DNB and created in collaboration with Lillehammer Art Museum.