Cristina Hodgson
THE Museo Carmen Thyssen presents a new exhibition of urban photography and casts a spotlight on the 1940s New York street life.
This urban photography exhibition brings together twenty images taken by two women photographers in New York in the 1940s, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model, and vindicates the work of artists who made urban themes the main motif of their production.
A repertoire that manifests a humanist and effective way of looking at the city, where everyday aspects attain an added and unpredicted value.
The inauguration of the exhibition coincides with International Women’s Day, justly highlighting the work of these two leading female photographers of direct photography (photography that has a documentary or journalistic nature).
Lisette Model (1901-1983), an Austrian who lived in New York, became a leading author of direct photography in the street and in bars, cafés and cabarets. Her work is made up of highly expressive anonymous portraits, which denote an attraction for the out of the ordinary, and which she captures in a furtive manner.
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) was one of the main representatives of American Street Photography. Levitt has been highly praised by critics for her idea of photography as a ‘poetics of the instant’ and her ability to turn the most ordinary motifs into extraordinary ones: street scenes of children at play and the most disadvantaged classes treated with empathy, respect and humanity.
The urban photography exhibition, ‘Street Life. Lisette Model and Helen Levitt in New York’ opens the gallery’s new ArteSonado space and will be on display until June 11.
READ MORE:
- Museums and statue of Pablo Picasso lead tourist enquiries in Spain’s Malaga
- Videogame Museum in Spain’s Malaga receives 11,000 visits in first month
