The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is delighted to present Street Life, an exhibition featuring seven photographers who documented life in Europe.

This exhibition is positioned as a sequel to the Dreaming of Tomorrow: Social Documentaries that Moved American Society exhibition, which was held at this museum in 2004. The earlier exhibition defined the American social documentary as documentary photography with the goal of social betterment and attempted to view the work of Jacob A. Riis and Lewis W. Hine, the work Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn produced for the FSA, and the work of the Photo League photographers systematically, in the context of the history of photography. It explored what the documentary as a means of social betterment was, its content, historical context, inevitability, and related issues. At the same time, that exhibition sought to communicate that each of those photographs captured" more than can be seen." The hypothesis that European documentary photography may be the source of that aspect of those works led to the planning of this exhibition.

For Street Life, we selected work by John Thomson, Thomas Annan, Bill Brandt, Brassai, Eugene Atget, Heinrich Zille, and August Sander, seven photographers from Britain, France, and Germany, countries that had been great powers since the Industrial Revolution and that were also early leaders in photography. Through their work, we will explore the nature of the photograph that communicates beyond what can be seen and what the relationship between such work and the social documentary is.

The exhibition will include 183 photographs, chiefly masterpieces from the 25,000 photographs in the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography combined with works from other museums in Japan.

About the Artists

BRANDT,Bill （1904-1983）
The Brighton seashore, thronged with people enjoying their holidays, an anti-poverty demonstration in a northern town, London at night, the streetlights and imposing buildings weaving a tapestry of light and shadow: Bill Brandt  captured many facets of life in Britain. What he photographed varied with the time and the place; what never changed was the acute critical consciousness expressed in his photographs, which hurl questions at the viewer.
Brandt's work shows us the changing realities of life in Britain in the years before and after World War Ⅱ.

SANDER,August （1876-1964）
August Sander attempted to create a complete depiction of society as a whole by carefully photographing individuals from every segment of it.
Young farmers in formal attira, a master pastry-maker standing alone in the kitchen, a composer wearing a bow tie, a village elementary school teacher with his hat in his hand, a tense-looking middle-class family: Sander's portraits do more than document German society during the Weimar Republic, for their radiance grows over time.

ANNAN, Thomas （1829-1887）
Glasgow, Scotland. Thomas Annan photographed this major city's old neighborhoods between 1868 and 1871.
Annan was commissioned by the city of Glasgow to take these photographs, as documents produced in preparation for urban redevelopment. They include not only buildings to be torn down and the intricate web of streets on which people lived but also people who happened to be passing by on them.
Superbly documenting the changing faces of the city, these photographs also faithfully communicate Annan's perspective as a photographer.

Thomson,John （1837-1921）
Bustling Victorian London during the Industrial Revolution: John Thomson photographed the lives of the people of London, lives lived on the streets.
Women selling flowers at the side of the road, a band composed of Italian immigrants, boys working as boot-blacks: London street lives took many forms.
Thomson examined every nook and cranny of the London streets and depicted each of his subjects with great care.

ZILLE, Heinrich （1858-1929）
Berlin in the late nineteenth century: Heinrich Zille focused o n the city's ordinary people, working hard, day after day, to survive.
His back views of women walking on towards the modernizing city ,hauling the firewood they have gathered to keep themselves alive, eloquently tell their stories today.
Zille was well known in Germany for his satirical drawings. The photographs he has left us were more than source materials for his drawings. They open up to us today a vast scope for interpretation.

Brassaï （1899-1984）
Born in Hungary, Brassaï photographed his new home, Paris, at n ight from many points of view.
City squares dimly lit by storefront lights, men and women out on the town in the wee hours at nightspots, the quiet streets after human traffic has ceased: Brassaï halted at places throughout the city to photograph the scenes before his eyes.
His work documents Paris by night in the 1930s. Gazing at his photographs, in them we also glimpse Brassaï himself, wandering through the dark in search of light.

ATGET, Jean Eugène Auguste （1857-1927）

Paris in the nineteenth century was at the height of its glory as a global metropolis. Eugène Atget watching much of that lovely old city vanish before his eyes, began making his collection of photographs of Paris at the turn of the century.
As "Documents pour Artistes," the trade plate on his door, advertised, Atget unpretentiously documented his city, photographing the facades and elaborately decorated interior staircases of historic buildings.
His consistent, thorough approach gives these photographs their documentary value while also defining the presence, transcending time, of their photographer.