Philip-LorcadiCorcia, New York, 1997, 1997, chromogenic print, cthe artist and David Zwirner, New York.

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. closes this weekend. Curated by Sarah Greenough, the exhibition covers more than 70 years of street photography, from Walker Evans's 1938 "Subway Portraits" series to Philip Lorca diCorcia’s large-format, highly structured 1990s images of ordinary people walking into their close-up, to a slideshow and video made by Beat Streuli in 2002 and 2009.

As a genre, street photography was arguably defined by Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand in New York City during the 1960s, and this work, while not included in the exhibition, still influences photographers drawn to the realities of the everyday scene. In his review of the show in Photograph magazine, Andy Grunberg wrote, “the show reasserts the impact of candid photography at a time when the likes of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, and Kelli Connell have valorized the pseudo-candid.

“Perhaps more importantly, from the perspective of the National Gallery, I Spy draws an undotted line of tradition straight through two photographers in whom it has invested heavily: Robert Frank and Harry Callahan. By linking them backwards via Walker Evans’s pre-war subway portraits and images of pedestrians in Bridgeport, Connecticut, then forwards to DiCorcia and Streuli’s 21st-century large color prints of unsuspecting city dwellers (with Davidson’s early-eighties subway series in the middle), curator Sarah Greenough conveys a history of practice that is all the more fascinating for being unwritten.” [More]

In an article published last year in The Observer, Sean O’Hagan dug into the genre’s history, bringing it up to date with his thoughts on work by contemporary photographers Paul Graham, Martin Parr, and Stephen Gill. “Paul Graham, one of the few whose work has made it from the street into the gallery…recently responded to a critic who dismissed photographers who specialized in ‘just snapping their surroundings.’ On Americansuburbx.com he wrote, ‘There remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself – photographs taken from the world as it is – are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory documentary tag.’” [More]

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010 is in the National Gallery of Art's West Building through August 5. For more information, visit the NGA's website. View the PDF Brochure for the show.