KANSAS CITY, MO.- The first major museum exhibition in the United States in over 50 years dedicated to Evelyn Hofer opens at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City Sept. 16. Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City focuses on photographs from Hofer’s series of widely distributed photobooks devoted to European and American cities, published throughout the 1960s, and features more than 100 vintage prints in both black and white and color from those publications. The works are drawn exclusively from the artist’s estate and the collections of the Nelson-Atkins and the High Museum, who co-organized and debuted the exhibition earlier this year.

“We are delighted for the opportunity to present these photographs together for the first time at our institutions and to highlight Hofer’s important artistic contributions, including as an early adopter of color photography,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Director & CEO of the Nelson-Atkins.

Born in Germany in 1922, Hofer left with her family for Switzerland in 1933 in response to the rise of fascism, settling first in Geneva, where she studied photography with Hans Finsler, a pioneer of the “new objectivity” movement. After time in Madrid, the family moved to Mexico, where Hofer worked briefly as a professional photographer. In 1946, she arrived in New York, where she worked with famed art director Alexey Brodovitch to produce photo essays for Harper’s Bazaar. She quickly expanded her practice and became an acclaimed editorial photographer.

Hofer’s celebrated editorial work spanned five decades, but she remained underrecognized in her lifetime, due in part to her unique style and methods.

“She had no interest in the gritty, snapshot aesthetic of small format street photography popular during the 1950s and 1960s,” said April Watson, Senior Curator, Photography at the Nelson-Atkins and co-curator of the exhibition. “She also embraced the expressive potential of color materials before many of her peers.”

Greg Harris, the High’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography and co-curator of the exhibition, adds: “Hofer’s photographs, made using a large-format camera, convey a captivating stillness, exactitude and sobriety that ran counter to the dominant aesthetics of the day. As a result, she never achieved recognition commensurate with the quality and originality of her work.”

Hofer made her greatest impact through a series of photobooks produced between 1958 and 1967 which focus on the cities of Florence, London, New York, Washington DC, Dublin, Paris (an unpublished project) and the country of Spain. Produced in collaboration with notable writers, the books combined portraits, landscapes and architectural views to convey the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of intense transformation after the end of World War II.

“Hofer wanted to get under the skin of a city, to picture the essential character of a place and its people,” said Watson. Eyes on the City includes prints from each of these projects, along with the artist’s notebooks and archival documents.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue offer new scholarship about Hofer’s understudied practice, tracing the early development of her career; the exchanges between her editorial and fine artwork; her mastery of color and her contribution to the history of 20th-century photographic portraiture; the nature of her intense collaborations with writers; and the ways her photographs intersected with emerging discourses and practices around post-war urban planning. In addition to essays by Watson and Harris, the catalogue features a contribution by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Geography Brandi Thompson Summers. Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City runs through February 11, 2024.

In an adjacent gallery in the Bloch Building Cities Are for People: Street Photography, 1945 – 1970 will also be on view. Curated by Marijana Rayl, Assistant Curator, Photography, it features 54 photographs from the Nelson-Atkins permanent collection by 40 different photographers and includes 35 photographs that have never before been on display here. Photographers featured in this exhibition include long established artists like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and lesser known, though no less significant, practitioners like Beuford Smith, Ruth Orkin, and Tosh Matsumoto. This is the first exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins dedicated to this major genre of photography that does not focus on a single artist.

“Street photography is deeply human,” said Rayl. “It can be brash, confrontational, and witty, bringing us face-to-face with the world and people around us. We’re very excited for our public to explore this subject in-depth through the eyes of so many great photographers.”

Cities Are for People is designed as a complement to Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City and shares an almost concurrent schedule. Visitors to each gallery will be encouraged to view the other, and to draw connections between the two exhibitions that help contextualize Hofer’s work by placing it into a broader photographic moment, subtly conveying the uniqueness of her practice and style.