Imagining New York

Published: 2009 - September/October, Cultural and Artistic Paths

The largest contemporary museum in the mountains of the “Triveneto” is dedicating an exhibition of photographs to the origins of the myth of the Big Apple. “ Imagine New York” at the Mart in Rovereto does not only offer an example of the works of “photostar” of every period, but it opens to multiple keys of reading.
Above all, the attention to the City of New York:  the curatrix Sarah Hermanson Meister has intended on reconstructing  the origins of the metropolis, just like we know it today, through the images captured by great photographers since the beginning of the twentieth century.  The journey starts from the famous “City of Ambition”, images dated 1910 by Alfred Stieglitz: the prophet of modernity in the land of America,  he was the first to immortalize the dynamism and the turmoil of New York.
The second protagonist of the exhibition at the Mart is the twentieth century itself: the exhibition does not only cover a hundred years of photographic history, recording the continual technological innovations, but  contemporaneously tells the events of a complicated century, reflected in the skyline of New York.
The third protagonist of “Imagine New York” is, its Museum of Modern Art, the famous MoMA, that since its inauguration in 1929, has understood the value of photographs.  This is demonstrated by the words of its first Director Alfred Barr, who wished “the collection has to extend itself beyond the boundaries of painting and sculpture”. There are, therefore, over 140 original photographs on display at Rovereto (until 11th October) from the permanent collections of the New York institutions – who already in 1940 dedicated a specific department to photography – and can be seen for the first time in Italy.
In the viewfinders of the photographs, there are above all vertical architectures.  Immortalizing them, in the 30’s were in particular, the “modernistic” photographers such as Ralph Steiner or Lewis W. Hine.  In the following ten years the “street” photographs by the Europeans Henry Cartier Bresson, Berenice Abbot or Helen Levitt, recapturing the vitality and exuberance of the New Yorkers.  The images destined for the illustrated pages of Life and Fortune transmit instead that new air that you breathed after the Second World War: here are the portraits of Irving Penn or the patinated ways of Richard Avedon in Harper’s Bazaar.
In the 60’s ugly things and chaos are origins of inspiration as much as the great social events, from Kennedy’s electoral campaign to the first tour of the Beatles in 1964.  For the artists of the last generation such as, Cindy Sherman or Thomas Struth, the lenses are pointed on the thousand voices and the thousand souls of New  York.
Decades after decades, the vitality of  New York always offers new inspirations to who utilizes photographs to give information or art.

For information:
www.mart.trento.it