America, America is an exhibition of photos by esteemed American photojournalists and street photographers such as Lewis Hine, Gordon Parks and Helen Levitt. They are all part of the Marin Karmitz collection and are on show at the Lumière Institute till 5 January.
The forty works on display span the 20th century, starting chronologically with Lewis Hine, who started applying his training as a sociologist to photography in 1905. His images of child labour and the conditions for immigrants passing through Ellis Island sought to bring about social change.
Helen Levitt started photographing the streets of New York in the 1930s. She focused especially on the lives of children in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
In the 1940s, Gordon Parks became the first black staff photographer on Life magazine. He documented life for African Americans, working for a time, like Dorothea Lange, for the Farm Security Administration established during the Depression.
W. Eugene Smith was a war correspondent in World War Two before becoming a photographer for Life magazine and Magnum photo agency. He specialised in photojournalism with a social conscience. He mentored the final photographer in the exhibition, Dave Heath, who discovered his love for photography while serving in the Korean War. His work from the 1950s focused on solitude and isolation.
You can download a guide booklet to the exhibition in English.
To prepare your visit, there is a lot of information online about the five photographers.
The International Center of Photography has biographies and examples of photos of Helen Levitt, W. Eugene Smith and Lewis Hine. The Library of Congress also has the collection of photos Hine took for the National Child Labor Committee.
There is a biography and examples of Dave Heath's work on the MoMA site.
And there is an archive of photos on the Gordon Parks Foundation site.
America, America
Collection Marin Karmitz
Institut Lumière Galérie Photo, Lyon
Till 5 January 2025
Copyright(s) :
Collection Marin Karmitz
Library of Congress
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Tag(s) : "exhibition" "Gordon Parks" "Helen Levitt" "Lewis Hine" "Lyon" "photography" "photojournalism" "portrait" "portraits" "street photography" "U.S. culture" "U.S. history"