Framing America.

Dulwich Picture Gallery turns its attention to the American city this summer with Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, a major exhibition tracing urban life across the United States through more than 100 works. Drawn from the Savings Bank Foundation DNB collection in Norway and presented with Lillehammer Art Museum, the show, curated by Alexander Moore, brings together landmark images from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

The exhibition begins in the early twentieth century, as American cities were being reshaped by rapid immigration and industrial expansion, as well as the quickly changing shape of the skyline. Lewis Hine’s Riding the Ball High up on Empire State, 1930, captures construction as spectacle and risk, while Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, 1907, gives the modern image a hard social edge. Our personal favourite is Lisette Model’s Coney Island Bather, New York City from 1939-1941.

After the Wall Street Crash, photography became a tool for recording poverty, unemployment and migration. Works by Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White trace the impact of the Great Depression, while Walker Evans and photographers associated with the New York Photo League bring everyday urban life into focus, from crowded streets to communities under pressure.

Later sections move through Berenice Abbott’s changing New York, Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter’s street scenes, Roy DeCarava’s Harlem photographs and the restless eye of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. Mary Ellen Mark’s portrait of homelessness and Peter Hujar’s image of a community affected by the AIDS crisis work to bring the century’s harder realities into the spotlight.

Feel the dynamism of the NYC subway at the exhibition close, where culturally curious visitors are faced with walls of Bruce Davidson’s series, made between 1980 and 1985. His vivid photographs capture the compressed theatre of New York underground. Seen together, these works transform the American city into a living organism, built from faces, labour, class and movement. A compelling summer show for anyone interested in photography, cities and the stories caught between them.