Exhibition dates: 28th July – 4th October, 2026

Curator: Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Artists: Berenice Abbott, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke‑White, Ted Croner, Imogen Cunningham, Bruce Davidson, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Morris Engel, Walker Evans, Louis Faurer, Lee Friedlander, John Gutmann, Lewis Hine, Peter Hujar, André Kertész, William Klein, Dorothea Lange, Saul Leiter, Arthur Leipzig, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Elaine Mayes, Lisette Model, Nicholas Nixon, Ruth Orkin, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Siskind, Herbert Snitzer, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1972
© Film Document LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne/ Paris

A bonus mid-week posting on Art Blart.

Some well-known favourites sprinkled with photographs unknown to me:

Berenice Abbott’s Exchange Place, New York (1933)
Margaret Bourke‑White’s Augusta, Georgia (1936)
Morris Engel’s Harlem Merchant, New York (1937)
Louis Faurer’s Looking at the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center (1949)
Saul Leiter’s Orange Umbrella (c. 1950)
William Klein’s Happy Days Bar, 3rd Avenue, New York (1954)
Peter Hujar’s Richie (1985)

I thought I knew most of Hujar’s photographs but not this one!

My favourite of the photographs I haven’t seen before is Roy DeCarava’s Hallway (1953), a moody evocation of tenement life in an American city.

So many images so little time!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The exhibition as a whole retells the American narrative of the city – almost all of the photographers here are first- or second-generation European immigrants. It also shows how photography became a way for artists to deal with the overwhelming nature of the city, to try to take hold of it, to make it their own – or try, like Garry Winogrand, to disappear into it completely, to come closer to “not existing” as the photographer described his process, a quote emphasised on the exhibition wall. Portrait of a City is about the multiplicity of quiet-but-dazzling instants that happen every day – like Peter Hujar’s Richie, standing to reflect for a second in the rain on a street in New York at night, raindrops glimmering on a car windscreen.”

Charlotte Jansen. “Portrait of a City review – master photographers capture the US cityscape in all its grime, grit and glory,” on The Guardian website Wed 29 Jul 2026 [Online] Cited 26/09/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
42nd Street and Sixth Avenue
1929
Gelatin silver print
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Step into a century of American city life through photographs that capture the people who built, inhabited, and transformed urban spaces into living, breathing communities.

The exhibition explores one hundred years of American urban life through the people who lived, worked, and moved through its streets. Featuring works by 34 influential photographers from 1907 to 2012, the exhibition traces how photography evolved alongside the modern city, capturing individuals and communities shaped by and shaping their environments.

Photography and the American City

Set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, the photographs reveal cities as dynamic stages for social change. From mass immigration and industrial growth to moments of counterculture and protest, photographers used urban spaces to examine identity, labour, and belonging. Adapting the traditions of portraiture, they recorded faces and lives that reflect the inner story of a nation in flux.

Artists and Highlights

Highlights include works by Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Bruce Davidson. Seen together, these portraits and cityscapes form a collective narrative that is both intimate and expansive, capturing the human experience at the heart of America’s evolving cities.

Partners and Collections

The exhibition is presented in special partnership with The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, drawing from its outstanding collection of twentieth-century American photography, with thanks to our partner, Lillehammer Art Museum.

Text from the Dulwich Picture Gallery website

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Riding the Ball High up on Empire State
c. 1930
Courtesy of The Savings Bank Foundation DNB Collection, on deposit at Lillehammer Art Museum

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York
1931
Gelatin silver print

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
The Maypole (Empire State Building)
1932
Gelatin silver print

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Exchange Place, New York
1933
Gelatin silver print

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) 'White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco' 1933

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California
1933
Gelatin silver print

Margaret Bourke‑White (American, 1904-1971)
Augusta, Georgia
1936
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)
March 1936
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Loews Facade, Harlem
1937
Gelatin silver print

Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005)
Harlem Merchant, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print

Rebecca Lepkoff (American, 1916-2014)
New York
1949
© Estate of Rebecca Lepkoff, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

William Klein (French born America, b. 1928)
Happy Days Bar, 3rd Avenue, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Orange Umbrella
c. 1950
© Saul Leiter Foundation

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Postmen
1952
© Saul Leiter Foundation

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Man with Straw Hat
c. 1955
© Saul Leiter Foundation

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Harlem
1960
© Saul Leiter Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, California
1987
© Mary Ellen Mark, Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Dulwich Picture Gallery announces Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography

In summer 2026, Dulwich Picture Gallery will present a major new exhibition Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, bringing together more than 100 landmark works by some of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The exhibition will chart the dramatic evolution of American city life from the early 1900s to the close of the 20th century. Featuring images from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, the exhibition draws exclusively from the DNB Saving Bank Foundation’s collection in Norway.

Showcasing 38 leading photographers of the modern era, Portrait of a City traces how photography has shaped our collective understanding of the American city.

It demonstrates how rapid urban expansion catalysed the medium’s rise as a tool to document changing conditions, presenting a compelling visual account of a nation in motion.

The exhibition opens in the early 1900s, a moment when American cities expanded rapidly through mass immigration, industrial growth and new forms of labour, drawing photographers to sites of social and economic shift. Evolving skylines became symbols of change, captured in works such as Lewis Hine’s Riding the Ball High up on Empire State, 1930. At the same time, photographers like Alfred Stieglitz were redefining the medium’s artistic potential; his seminal image The Steerage, 1907, reveals the realities of labour and class with striking immediacy.

After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, photography took on an urgent social role, recording mass unemployment, poverty and migration. Iconic works, including Dorothea Lange’s White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 and Margaret Bourke‑White’s Augusta, Georgia, 1936 trace the profound impact of the Great Depression, bringing into sharp focus the harsh realities of the following years for people across the United States.

Here, the exhibition changes gear, tracing the rise of photographic modernism through artists such as Walker Evans, whose work helped secure photography’s place within the modern art world. Alongside this, the influence of the New York Photo League is represented through photographers including Weegee, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, Aaron Siskind, Rebecca Lepkoff and Lisette Model, whose socially engaged images document the rhythms and pressures of everyday urban life. Also presented are intimate portrayals of marginalised communities in New York, including Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter’s studies of street life and Roy DeCarava’s tender images of Black life in Harlem.

The exhibition then turns to artists documenting the dramatic physical changes reshaping American cities in the mid‑20th century. Works by Berenice Abbott record the evolution of New York’s skyline, setting new architectural forms against the city’s historic fabric, while Arthur Leipzig’s Divers, East River, 1948 captures how peripheral urban spaces became sites of leisure and community.

Moving into the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition explores how photographers responded to a nation undergoing cultural and political transformation. Artists such as Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams examined the structures and systems of the built environment, while Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander brought new immediacy to street photography. This section also presents powerful depictions of life on the margins, including Mary Ellen Mark’s The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, 1987, which confronts the realities of homelessness, and Peter Hujar’s Richie, 1985, offering an intimate insight into communities affected by the AIDS crisis.

Portrait of a City concludes with a presentation of Bruce Davidson’s renowned Subway series, 1980-85, whose vivid, unflinching photographs capture the diversity, individuality and raw immediacy of New York life, an enduring hallmark of the photographer’s career.

Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Curator of the exhibition, said: “American photography offers one of the most vivid and influential records of the modern city, and by bringing this remarkable collection to London, we invite audiences to reflect on how the rhythms, challenges and possibilities of urban life continue to echo through our own – a century of human stories told with extraordinary immediacy and invention.”

Anders Bjørnsen, Manager, Art & Culture, DNB Savings Bank Foundation, said: “These photographs capture the profound social and cultural changes that have shaped the modern American city. We are pleased to share this important collection with new audiences through our collaboration with Dulwich Picture Gallery, and to highlight photography’s unique ability to tell human stories across time and place.”

Jennifer Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “The spirit, aspiration, and reality of the 20th Century are captured in these photographs. Meticulously collected over the past ten years by the DNB Savings Bank Foundation, the exhibition is testament to this outstanding Norwegian art collection and creates exciting visual links to the landscape paintings in our Collection.”

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography is curated by Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery (Curator of Unearthed: Photography’s Roots, 2021). The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour publication written and edited by Alexander Moore and Nils Ohlsen, Director, Lillehammer Art Museum, published by Dulwich Picture Gallery, June 2026.

Press release from the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014)
Divers, East River
1948
Gelatin silver print
Arthur Leipzig/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Looking at the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center
1949
Gelatin silver print
Louis Faurer/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009)
Hallway
1953
Gelatin silver print

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
From the portfolio Big Shots
Gelatin silver print

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) 'Richie' 1985

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1980-85
From the Subway series
Dye-transfer/chromogenic print

“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”

“It’s a great social equalizer … From the moving train above ground, we see glimpses of the city, and as the train moves into the tunnels, sterile fluorescent light reaches into the stony gloom and we, trapped inside, all hang on together”

“I feel that there was a passion and a purpose to photographing in the subway. We were all in the same boat and I was just expressing the everyday occurrences in the subway at that point in 1980. It’s a different subway, although you still have to watch your back.”

~ Bruce Davidson