In a summer of scorching heat waves, the romance of city life is scorched, too. Tower blocks suffocate and pavements burn, even in Paris, where whimsical iron railings now resemble prison bars. High-density living is dangerous, as our ancestors well knew. This is the backdrop to Dulwich Picture Gallery's new exhibition, 'Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography', which explores how 20th-century American photographers documented their country's major cities and grappled with the urge to build upwards and outwards.
The exhibition showcases iconic shots that don't quite build into one towering narrative. New York's skyline, now so familiar that it adorns film credits and baseball caps, was once unexpected and unnatural to the photographers who watched it being built. Berenice Abbott's 1933 image 'Exchange Place, New York' is a vertiginous four times taller than it is wide, with blocks pressing together and crushing ant-like figures at street level. Edward Streichen's 'The Maypole (The Empire State Building)' uses double exposure to turn this landmark into an alien cross-hatching of lines, dizzying and unsettling.
While some photographers focused on the city's heights, others captured the ordinary people living in its shadow. Lisette Model, a Viennese-born photographer who tutored Diane Arbus, empowers her subjects in 'Coney Island Bather, New York City' (1939-41), showing a sturdy woman squatting in front of the waves, grinning into the distance, resisting femininity for the camera. Arbus' own 'Woman with white gloves and fancy hat, NYC' (1963) is a highlight, with its defiant subject wearing her headgear like a helmet and holding her hands like boxing mitts.
Helen Levitt's photos of Harlem street life, on the other hand, capture little human moments in a poverty-stricken melting pot, avoiding mawkish social commentary. In 'New York' (1972), kids play with animated gestures that are tantalisingly opaque, making you hardly notice the graffiti-covered boarded-up shops behind them or the rubbish on the ground.
The exhibition is roughly chronological, starting in the early 1900s and culminating with Bruce Davidson's moody, cinematic 1980s shots of New York subway scenes. However, the images don't always combine into a clear throughline, as they are drawn from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation collection of American photography. The exhibition is slightly overwhelming, with many photographers represented by just one or two images, telling many stories at once.
Despite this, the exhibition offers something for everyone, with varied, jostling, and unsettling perspectives on American life. It's a testament to the power of photography as an artistic discipline, rising up alongside the city and exploring endless possibilities. The exhibition is a reminder of the danger of high-density living and the romance of city life, even in the face of scorching heat waves.
