Featuring over two hundred photographs from the 1940s to the 1970s by Diane Arbus, her peers, and other artists inspired by her vision, Street Credibility examines a critical period in contemporary photography wherein artists increasingly eschewed the candid, documentary style for visibly mediated, staged images of real or performed subjects. Arbus is presented as a pivotal figure in this development, straddling the street photography of predecessors like Robert Frank and Weegee and the composed tableaux of later artists like Cindy Sherman and Sally Mann. Arbus’s photos of social “outcasts,” including giants, nudists, people with dwarfism, and self-identified transvestites, are carefully composed to resemble the poses and images canonized by earlier documentary work, but clearly staged. The three decades covered by the exhibition thereby trace changing attitudes toward photography as an authentic document versus a mediated image, with Arbus somewhere in-between. Other artists in the exhibition included Brassaï, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Theo Ehret, Larry Clark, and Charles Gatewood, as well as Frank, Weegee, Sherman, and Mann.
Street Credibility was guest-curated by artist Mike Kelley.