Street Photography Exhibit and Lecture at the National Gallery of Art

The Streets of New York: American Photographs from the Collection, 1938-1958 is an exhibition of 70 holdings and recent acquisitions of the National Gallery of Art currently on display.

An illustrated lecture program starts at 2:00pm and features Andy Grundberg, photo critic for the New York Times; art historian Jane Livingston; and film critic James Naremore.

To lighten things up a little after the exhibit and lecture, I'm thinking about heading over to Capitol City Brewing Company to wind down the event :)

From the NGA's website:
"During these two decades several photographers working in New York profoundly changed the course of the medium. They include Evans and Frank, as well as Roy DeCarava, Louis Faurer, Sid Grossman, William Klein, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, and Weegee. In order to capture the transitory nature of modern life, these photographers used small unobtrusive cameras and available light, and allowed their images, sometimes random in terms of subject matter, to be blurred, out of focus, and even off kilter. Evans began in 1938 with a series of photographs of riders on the New York subways, soon followed by Levitt's equally candid, yet far more fluid studies of children on the streets of New York; DeCarava's poignant studies of African American life described in dense, luxurious shades of black; Model's boldly aggressive photographs of New York's bars and nightclubs; Klein's and Weegee's profoundly disturbing photographs of New York's latent violence; and Frank's poetic and often provocative views of the city in the early 1950s."

I'm hoping that this event will be a good inspiration for an "assignment" on street photography, where we can all head out and try our hand at street photography in DC and bring our results in to share at December's monthly meetup.

We will meet up in the National Gallery of Art, West Building, in the Rotunda and head over to the exhibition to have a look before heading over to the lecture in the East Building auditorium.

Exhibition Info, Exhibition Highlights, NPR Story