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on NYTimes: Mean Streets, Kind Cameras
perla de leon
Nov 12, 2018
By Vicki Goldberg
“Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here, an exhibition organized by E. Carmen Ramos, the museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, presents 93 photos by 10 Latino photographers, all well established but many not as widely known as they should be.
Nine men and one woman train their cameras on Latino enclaves from Spanish Harlem to East Los Angeles, from the 1950s — when many cities were in crisis and governments tried to put out the (sometimes literal) fires — to the present. Some 55 million Latinos constitute the largest minority in America. How do they regard the places they call home? Answers vary. Clues are on the wall.
Mean Streets, Kind Cameras
An exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum asks, whose images have influenced our view of cities? Would someone who lived in these cities picture them differently than an outsider?
