Unfortunately I’m more than unlikely to be in Milwaukee in the next couple of months (I’m not sure they’d let me in to the USA, and with the current fuss over “security” I think all those of us who need to travel with syringes are likely to have a hard time of it.) But for those that are, the show Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in AmericanPhotography, 19401959, which features the work of Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank, continues at the Milwaukee Art Museum until April 25, 2010.
You can read a little more about the show (including that it also has work by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt and Weegee, among others) and that it claims to be the first major examination of street photography of the 1940s and 50s in nearly 20 years on Art Knowledge News.
While its hard to disagree with the statement that the six featured photographers “embraced photography as an ‘act of living‘”, it is perhaps harder to accept the opposition between this and telling a story, particularly with the work of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and particularly Smith in mind who did pretty well at both. But like many shows it sounds as if it would be good to view whatever caveats you might have about some of the curatorial texts.
There is a short review of the catalogue on the NY Times and a little more about the show here.