Author: Trent

We Are Here is admirably diverse, and many of the pictures are great. Highlights include the lush, wacky, fashion-forward work that Feng Li has been making on the streets of Chengdu, China; Romuald Hazoumè’s cheeky sculptural typologies of laden bike riders in Benin; the oneiric pictures of 1990s Saint Petersburg by Alexey Titarenko; a collection of era-defining 1990s Japanese street-style pictures that Shoichi Aoki shot for his magazine FRUiTS; and exuberant pictures of children’s play in gritty 1970s New York by graffiti documentarian Martha Cooper, which elaborate on earlier projects by Helen Levitt and Arthur Leipzig. Yet the exhibition is also dogged by a nagging question: Is twenty-first-century street photography hopelessly outmoded?

Despite their persistent erasure, Japanese women have been involved in photography since its arrival in the country in the late 1850s