City Streets explores the rise of “street” and “social landscape” photography during the post-war era in America. More and more photographers took to the streets in search of distinct contrasts, expressive metaphors and unplanned dramatic scenarios.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of serious pictorial photographers, including Alfred Steiglitz, reacted to the snapshot craze that gripped the nation with the invention of the portable camera by forming organizations dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art. A few decades later, Walker Evans, reconsidered snapshots and documentary photographs to be unassuming forms of American folk art in their own right. By the 1950s, a number of younger photographers such as Robert Frank and William Klein had begun to embrace the formal energy, impulsiveness, and immediacy of the snapshot and to imitate these qualities in their own work. Others like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander wandered the streets, cameras in hand, capturing seemingly random moments and occurrences of daily city life.