Hit The Street

Amy Arbus

Alan Kleinberg

Ash Thayer

Andre D. Wagner

Curated by John Silvis

Outlet Fine Art presents “Hit the Street,” an exhibition of four contemporary photographers whose images of New York City reveal what Susan Sontag calls the “voluptuous extremes” of urban life. As avid collectors of human tableaus on the street, Amy Arbus, Alan Kleinberg, Ash Thayer, and Andre D. Wagner each explore the intimacy, alienation, hazards, fashions, and performances of urban life. Their work mines the historic link between the city and the photographer’s art: as photographic technology has advanced to keep pace with urban growth, the photographer has become an architect of the urban environment. In the tradition of mid-century photographers like Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Saul Leiter, these artists take the city as their subject and refract their experience of the place through their distinctive lens over four decades of New York City street-life. A catalog of each photographer’s work will be available for purchase on the Outlet Shop website.

Amy Arbus

As a fashion columnist for the Village Voice during the 1980s, Amy Arbus trawled SoHo, the East Village, and the Lower East Side, capturing the neighborhood’s street styles. Her downtown tribe of artists and provocateurs draw on new wave, glam, rock, mod, punk and the influence of 1950s Greasers to fashion baroque patterns of self-presentation—from the dandyism of the performing duo McDermott and McGough to the trench coat cool of Madonna on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. With her camera, Arbus reveals the street as a staging ground for the ritual performance of self.

Arbus has published five books of photographs, including the award winning On the Street 1980-1990. Her work has appeared in periodicals such as New York Magazine, People, Aperture and The New York Times Magazine and been shown in twenty-five solo exhibitions worldwide. Her photographs are included in collections held by The National Theater in Norway, The New York Public Library and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Alan Kleinberg

Native New Yorker Alan Kleinberg has been looking through the camera’s lens since Woodstock, which he photographed with a department store Kodak. As a hairdresser for fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vogue, Kleinberg gained intimate access to the work of photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn during the late 1960s and early 70s. Through his longtime friendship with pioneering New York photographer Saul Leiter, Kleinberg deepened his practice, developing an approach to photography that merged Leiter’s interest in street scenes with his own keen eye for the human subject.

Kleinberg has exhibited his work in New York at Mary Boone Gallery and OUTLET Fine Art. His photographs are archived with the Richard Avedon Foundation and held in other private collections. His catalogue Alan Kleinberg: Portraits 1976-79 was published by OUTLET in 2014.

Ash Thayer

L.A.-based photographer Ash Thayer spent the 1990s among the squatting community of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In a zone abandoned by government and industry, before the arrival of high-rise condos and high-priced boutiques, Thayer’s squatters, junkies, outcasts and punks banded together to build a home. Collected in her book, Kill City: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000, these images capture the dreamy freedom and the malaise of life among the ruins.

Thayer has exhibited work in group and solo exhibitions in New York, Memphis, and at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Her photographs are held in several art collections including the Saatchi Gallery in London, The Chicago Art Institute, and The Museum of the City of New York. Kill City was published by powerHouse Books in 2015.

Andre D. Wagner

Brooklyn-based photographer Andre D. Wagner captures intimate scenes of everyday life in neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy, where new racial and economic realities are transforming the streets. Wagner, shooting black-and-white images on traditional film, finds the grainy textures of urban life among the neighborhoods’ longtime residents: an African American father embracing his children under the elevated train tracks; a Hasidic Jewish family on its way to school. As they answer the camera with their own gaze, Wagner’s subjects exert their autonomy and reveal their dignity.

Wagner has exhibited work in group and solo shows in Los Angeles and New York. His book Black Boys was published by Creative Future in 2013 and the Purist Vol. 1 in 2014.