Road Atlas: Street Photography from Helen Levitt to Pieter Hugo

Streets are not only a basic feature of the urban landscape they are also places of encounter, characterised by an endlessly varying combination of static and moving elements. In their street pictures, photographers record views of buildings, everyday situations and radical changes. Their images document times of prosperity and times of stagnation and record the remaining traces of vanishing urban spaces. They also capture the inhabitants and typical players on the urban scene. Streets are the threads linking cities and bringing people together. At the same time, they are symbolic of the distances that separate people and often consign them to solitude. This selection is taken from the DZ Bank Collection, over 6,000 photographic works by more than 550 artists, one of the most important art collections to focus specifically on photographic images. It features streets from around the world – from the postwar period to the present day. The list of photographers represented begins with Helen Levitt (1913-2009), the classic street photographer, and ends with contemporary artists such as Philip-Lorca di Corcia (b. 1951), Beat Streuli (b. 1957) and Pieter Hugo (b. 1976).