Bright Lights, Big City

About

Featuring the brooding and beautiful photography of Daniel Sackheim, exhibiting for the first time in London, Bright Lights, Big City explores our changing perspective on urban landscapes, tracing a line from the bustling rush-hour sidewalks of Ted Williams’ never-before-seen images of 1950s Chicago, through Terry O’Neill, Gered Mankowitz and Douglas Kirkland’s star-studded London and LA of the 60s and 70s, Norman Parkinson’s dizzying fashion in Paris, and the gritty glitz of New York City from the 50s onwards through the lenses of Eve Arnold, Sonia Moskowitz, Allan Tannenbaum and Dafydd Jones. 

The cities of the 20th century thrummed like magnets, drawing in their populations from rural hinterlands and across borders and seas. City lights glowed with the prospect of prosperity, fortune or fame. In Chicago and New York, people filled cafes, catwalks and discos, whilst Swinging 60s London became the epicentre of youth culture; the 70s saw nonconformists of every psychedelic stripe make LA and San Francisco their spiritual home. In this pre-internet age, cities were the connective hubs, the centres of cultural transfer and emergent communities.   

Now, in the post-internet, post-pandemic 21st century, cities have become fickle giants: shining with financial promise, but intimidating and unstable, thronging with masked crowds in one moment, locked down and deserted in the next. If the lights of the 21st century city are brighter than ever, the shadows it casts are deeper and longer. 

“We are thrilled to be displaying such a diverse and distinguished range of photographers in our first show of 2024,” says Carrie Kania, Creative Director at Iconic Images. “As the scene of every kind of human drama and emotion, the city has been a muse for artists from Dickens up to the modern day. Bright Lights, Big City is a celebration of everything from urban photojournalism and documentary street photography to iconic fashion campaigns and celebrities caught in the concrete jungle.”