A Century of America Through the Lens

A century of American cities seen through photography. Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 4 October 2026, brings together more than one hundred images from the collection of the Savings Bank Foundation DNB in Norway. Spanning the years from 1907 to 2012, the exhibition moves through New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, tracing changes in the urban landscape and in the lives of the people who inhabit it. At the beginning of the 20th century, industrial growth, immigration and the expansion of major cities gave photography a new field of observation. Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott recorded infrastructure, buildings, labour and urban density, while during the Great Depression Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans brought the social consequences of the economic crisis to the foreground. The city became both a subject in itself and a setting through which changes in American society could be observed. The exhibition also follows the rise of street photography and the gradual shift of the camera towards behaviour, encounters and everyday situations. Helen Levitt photographed children and street life in New York neighbourhoods, from the 1950s and 1960s, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander produced less orderly and more fragmented images of the metropolis, while Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams also turned their attention to buildings, suburbs and the structures shaping the American urban landscape. The social transformations of the final decades of the 20th century are also represented. In 1987 Mary Ellen Mark photographed the Damm family in their car in Los Angeles, addressing homelessness, while Peter Hujar’s 1985 portrait of Richie is connected to communities affected by the AIDS crisis. Migration, labour, marginalisation, protest and belonging emerge across photographs made at different times and in different contexts. The sequence concludes with Subway, Bruce Davidson’s colour series made on the New York subway between 1980 and 1985. Carriages, platforms and passengers form a portrait of the city through its everyday transport system, where people of different ages, backgrounds and social groups share the same space for a few minutes.