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Past Exhibitions
Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936–1966
November 5, 2004–March 6, 2005
The Howard Gilman Gallery
Learn more about this exhibition.
In the years from the Great Depression to the late 1960s, artists such as Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Helen Levitt presented ambitious, artfully sequenced surveys of their work in monographic form. Drawn from the collections of the Metropolitan and the Gilman Paper Company, this exhibition of approximately 35 prints comprises suites of photographs from six milestones in the history of photography, from Walker Evans’s Many Are Called—featuring his legendary hidden-camera portraits of subway passengers—to Robert Frank’s beat-era classic The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. The exhibition also includes copies of each book, some represented in multiple editions to show how the meaning of images changed with their presentation.