‘Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography’ evaluation

America within the early 1900s was in a state of flux. A gradual transition away from the nation’s agricultural foundations and a motion in direction of an industrial, fashionable world have been triggering seismic modifications.

Thanks to parallel developments in images, it’s a cultural shift closely documented, and one which’s on the coronary heart of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition, ‘Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography’ (till 4 October 2026). Beginning within the early twentieth century, when – because of the digicam turning into a extra reasonably priced buy for households – images was turning into extra democratic, the exhibition unites 38 of the period’s main photographers, who seize the USA’s tumultuous volatility.

Tracing a chronological path by the century, the exhibition begins with Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, a picture that captured the sharp inequalities of sophistication by the divide on an ocean liner. The reverberations from the Wall Street Crash in 1929 could be felt in essential works by Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke‑White, who documented the devastating results of mass unemployment and the debilitating poverty of the Great Depression that adopted.

The bodily area of town takes form in a large number of the way, with photographers together with Berenice Abbott, Arthur Leipzig and Ed Ruscha contemplating the structure of town itself, from the skyline to how the types of the buildings and open areas tailored to accommodate new calls for in work and leisure. On the streets, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander flip their lens to folks creating new methods to reside, whereas Peter Hujar paperwork the communities ravaged by AIDS.

‘American photography offers one of the most vivid and influential records of the modern city,’ says Alexander Moore, exhibition curator and artistic producer at Dulwich Picture Gallery. ‘By bringing this remarkable collection to London, we invite audiences to reflect on how the rhythms, challenges and possibilities of urban life continue to echo through our own – a century of human stories told with extraordinary immediacy and invention.’

‘Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography’ is at Dulwich Picture Gallery till 4 October 2026. Presented in partnership with Savings Bank Foundation DNB and created in collaboration with Lillehammer Art Museum