Celebrating the City Online

Since the invention of photography, the streets of New York City have lured picture-makers from across the world. Each borough, neighborhood, and corner offers an opportunity to see something new through the lens, yielding images as varied as the street life itself. New York’s diverse built environment provides a backdrop for the true subject of many photographers: the varied lives of New Yorkers.

The photographers in this exhibition have immortalized this ever-changing urban center. Each has created a distinctive vision of the city, providing a window into a vast and complex metropolis. They have also made use of the changing technology of photography itself to produce images whose meanings range from apparently objective reflections of reality to highly crafted expressions of the artists’ responses to the people and the city around them. Together, these photographs provide a dense but invaluable record of the oden-overlooked moments of drama, poignancy, humor, and serendipity that occur every day against this urban backdrop. At their essence, they celebrate the life of the city.

The prints in this gallery were recently donated to the Museum of the City of New York by Joy of Giving Something, Inc. (JGS), a nonprofit organization created by the late financier and collector Howard Stein to support the photographic arts by working in partnership with museums, schools, and community organizations. This transformational donation includes nearly 1,000 photographs with works by more than 40 photographers who are now represented in our permanent collection for the first time. JGS’s generous donation greatly enhances the Museum’s ability to tell the story of New York City through the lens of many of the medium’s greatest photographers.

All of the photographs on view in this main gallery are gifts of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.