Scenes of America
Photography between City, Subculture and Myth

Helen Levitt devoted extensive workgroups to New York City and its inhabitants. With her shots of scenes in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side in the 1940s she made an important contribution to Street Photography. In the 1980s, Nan Goldin and David Armstrong then pointed their lenses at their private surroundings and offered intimate insights into their own lives and those of their friends. The two lived in a New York flat share for a time.

Dennis Stock and Lewis Baltz’s photos of the American West could hardly be more different. Whereas Stock sheds light on the myth of the “California dream” from the sunny mindset of the surfing culture to the hippie movement, Baltz’s rigorously formalistic architecture scenes focus on the banality of that state’s suburbs and industrial zones.

Andy Warhol and Richard Prince subscribed to a similar aesthetic: Both explored pop culture and the mass media and worked with strategies of repetition and grouping. Authorship, originality and authenticity were modernist concepts they rejected. Their serial photo works open our eyes to the diversity and further development of photographic imagery.