MoPA: Streetwise: Masters of 60's Photogrphy

Streetwise: Masters of 60's Photography

I recently attended The Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego where I really experienced some of the best photography I have ever really been exposed to. Before a lot of the photography I was familiar with was just fashion photography which can become somewhat repetitive and boring at times. This really opened my eyes to the many different beauties photography can bring about. Shapes, colors, subjects make all the difference in producing a powerful image. The Exhibit that caught my eye the most was the Streetwise: Masters of 60’s Photography. I love digital photography but this exhibit really made me want to learn how to use a film camera and a darkroom to develop my own photo’s. This really just made me a lot more passionate about learning photography as a whole and knowing every aspect of photography instead of just digitally taking pictures and editing them digitally on Lightroom (which I love as well).

Streetwise: Masters of 60’s Photography builds on what Swiss photographer Robert Frank began with his new "snapshot aesthetic," which was brought to the foreground with the domestic release of his ground breaking book The Americans, in January 1960. His focus on a more personal documentary style would influence a new generation of photographers: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Jerry Berndt, Ruth-Marion Baruch, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, and Ernest Withers.

Intent on redefining the nation based on what they saw, documentary photographers were increasingly concerned with revealing a more realistic, sometimes dire, but always challenging view of an America undergoing change. Ranging from the "outlaw culture" of bikers and chain gangs; Boston's red light district known as the Combat Zone; Black Panthers; the gritty streets and neighborhoods of New York; the politically charged South; to the darker sub-cultures photographed by Diane Arbus. Many of these photographers spent time with their subjects and wanted their photographs to represent the larger narrative of actual events.