Bright lights, big city

The history of photography in the 20th century is inextricably linked with the city of New York, as an exhilarating new exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art illustrates, writes AIDAN DUNNE

IF YOU CAN make it there, you'll make it anywhere – that could be the motto of many a 20th-century photographer. In terms of the evolving drama of its architectural and human character, no city is as enmeshed with the development of photography as New York in the 20th century. Although Sarah Hermanson Meister, who organised Imma's exhibition Picturing New York, does come up with a comparable metropolis: "There's Paris, but that's Paris in the 19th century, where you find the transformation of the city almost parallels the transformation of photography. In the 20th century, that happens in New York." Picturing New Yorkis an exhilarating, novelistic spectacle, an engrossing account of human life within the sweeping framework of the quintessential big city. The show comprises 145 works from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York's incomparable photographic collection. Hermanson Meister, a curator in MoMA's photography department, is herself a New Yorker, and hence ideally qualified to explain how the complex character of her home city has been documented and interpreted in photographs.

She is also refreshingly open and un-doctrinaire in her definition of what photography is, so that the exhibition is an extremely lively conversation between some of the biggest names in modern photographic history – including Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans and Irving Penn – and those who remain anonymous, people who were simply doing their jobs, taking photographs for functional or personal rather than artistic reasons. They were producing what has become known as, Hermanson Meister explains, “ vernacular photography”. She points to the example of a beautifully atmospheric urban study which takes in the corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd and 43rd Streets in 1914. “The man who took that picture was employed to take photographs of all the pavements in Manhattan,” she says. Was he making aesthetic decisions in choosing the hour – 10.27am – for the light, or composing the forms and masses of the picture in such a persuasive way? We don’t know. “Maybe he got lucky,” she says. “But maybe it was more than luck.”

Picturing New Yorkcame about because IMMA director Enrique Juncosa was keen to bring photography from the MoMA collection to Ireland. But for his reputation and, Hermanson Meister notes, his persistence – "in the nicest sense of the term" — it would not have happened. When two other European venues were added to its itinerary, it became logistically possible. When it came to devising the shape of the show, she drew on a previous project she and her colleagues had been involved in, Life of the City, an exhibition prompted by the events of September 11th, 2001. It consisted partly of works drawn from the collection, charting photography in and of New York in the 20th century, a strand she later developed into a book. A book, she says, "in a small way. There were about 65 images, no real essay or anything".

She thought the idea was worth further exploration and the result is Picturing New York, the exhibition and its accompanying book, with an essay by Hermanson Meister and about 150 beautifully reproduced photographs. If there is a dialogue between art and vernacular photography at the heart of the show, there's another conversation going on as well: that between the extraordinary physical, architectural fabric of the city, and the millions of people who inhabit and visit its various boroughs. New York is famous for its attitude and its vitality, "its local flavour and global ambition", as Hermanson Meister succinctly puts it.

It’s hardly surprising that street photography of several kinds became major genres in the city, developed throughout the century, from the documentary work of Lewis Hine to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s anecdotal “decisive moments”, echoed in the poised work of Robert Frank, for one, and the quirky social observation of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. This sharpens into something much crueler in Diane Arbus’s startling character studies and Weegee’s gritty scenes of urban nightlife and, sometimes, mayhem and death. Helen Levitt’s instinct for capturing character comes through consistently, and often the most memorable images are of workaday, ordinary life, as fine photographs by Barney Ingoglia, Danny Lyon, Louis Faurer, Carl T Gosset Jr and Ed Feingersh all confirm. New York really is local and global, and there’s a universality to the myriad scenes of city life.

Chronologically, though, Hermanson Meister begins with the inescapable figure of Alfred Stieglitz, influential as a photographer, editor and gallerist responsible for the first arts venue in the city devoted to photography, in 1905. Stieglitz’s Pictorialism was, as it sounds, aligned with painterly effects, particularly those of the Impressionists and the Symbolists. The Pictorialists set themselves aesthetically apart from trade and amateur photographers – the practitioners of vernacular photography, in other words. However, Stieglitz was restlessly progressive, Hermanson Meister points out, and didn’t languish in a stylistic backwater. He edged art photography in the direction of the city’s dynamism, to great effect.

Manhattan is the “geographic and metaphoric heart of New York”. Its limited space, allied to steel-framed building technology and the elevator, pushed the skyline ever upwards, as Hermanson Meister notes, and ensured a rapid cycle of demolition and development. Drabness co-exists with sleek modernist monumentality. Photographers both vernacular and artistic were stirred by the challenge of the emerging cityscape. What is really striking is how the architectural images of such photographers as Paul Strand, Bernice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Charles Sheeler and Edward Steichen anticipate and influence modern art movements such as minimalism which, in turn, feeds back into the work of more recent photographers of the city, including Harry Callahan. Hermanson Meister is particularly fond of a stunning 1948 street view by Todd Webb, echoed but never surpassed in later panoramic photographs.

Her own interest in photography extends back into her childhood. She would spend weekends in the darkroom of her school photo club. As she began to study the subject, she took a more measured view of her own efforts.

“Being in close contact with the work of the great photographers,” she says, “made me recognise the gulf between what I do with a camera and what these people do. You realise you’re not in that league. At the same time, taking photographs yourself gives you a certain empathy with just how difficult it really is.” And, she emphasises: “Photographs reproduce really well. We’re used to seeing them in books, magazines, onscreen – but one of the things this exhibition does, I hope, is to show there’s something special, something unique, about standing in front of a real photographic print.”

Picturing New York: Photographs from the Museum of Modern Artis showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, until February 7, 2010. Admission: €5 (concessions €3). See modernart.ie for more information