Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography
Street photography is much more than simply capturing a scene — it uses the camera to transform what might seem ordinary into something strangely beautiful, or even unsettling.
The ubiquity of camera phones today has, in many ways, made all the world a stage. In the modern city, photographers are less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and far more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street. Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many artists use the camera as a tool of transformation — taking everyday moments and elevating them from the ordinary to the remarkably beautiful or the quietly ominous.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography, an exhibition that explores the evolving techniques and approaches photographers have used over the past fifty years to record the human experience as it unfolds in densely populated urban spaces — from Harlem and Los Angeles to Tokyo and Istanbul.
Opening on October 11, 2025, the exhibition brings together seminal works from the 1970s through the 1990s by Stephen Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, alongside more recent contributions by Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss. Together, these images create a compelling visual conversation that invites visitors to consider not only developments in photography, but also the broader cultural and social changes reflected in city life.
“Street photography has to do with where the photograph is taken. Nowadays, that can mean almost nothing, because it could be anywhere,” says Karen Haas, the MFA’s Lane Senior Curator of Photographs. “Today, the street can be something imagined, something creative.”
Installed in the museum’s Herb Ritts Gallery, the exhibition spans five decades of photographic practice and features staged, spontaneous, and panoramic works that illustrate the genre’s continual transformation. Faces in the Crowd ultimately invites viewers to reflect on how photographers — past and present — continue to turn the fleeting theater of urban existence into enduring works of art.
The exhibition will remain on view through July 13, 2026.
Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography
through July 13, 2026
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – Herb Ritts Gallery – Boston – USA
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