Echoing the exhibition “Disco, I’m coming out” at the Philharmonie de Paris, Polka invites you to rediscover the roaring twenties of this musical genre as committed as it is innovative with the work of New Yorker Meryl Meisler. A chronicler of the disco effervescence at the end of the 1970s, the photographer has delved back into her archives and tells us about the nightlife of Manhattan’s mythical nightclubs, including the famous “Studio 54”.

DISCO, I’m Coming Out
Philharmonie de Paris Musée De La Musique 
On exhibit through August 17, 2025
Curators: Jean-Yves Leloup, commissaire & Marion Challier, commissaire-associée
221 avenue Jean-Jaurès, 75019 Paris, France
For more information contact Hamid Si Amer

Casting aside the clichés, this exhibition does justice to the dazzling power of disco – a genre deeply rooted in the history and culture of black America, descended from soul, gospel and funk.

A collection of audiovisual archives, photographs, instruments, costumes, design objects and works of art underlines the political and festive dimension of this music, which brought different minorities and social classes to the dance floor, all united in the same hedonistic impulse. Artists include: Meryl Meisler, Andy Warhol, Peter Hujar, Faith Ringgold, Tom Bianchi, Michael Abramson, Tina Paul, Pacifico Silano, and Bill Bernstein.

Care / Condition / Control
601 Art Space
On exhibit through April 27, 2025
Curator: A.E. Chapman
88 Eldridge St., NYC, NY
For more information contact Sara Shaoul

Humans are obsessed with hair. And hair is never just hair. Intensely personal, it is quite literally how people frame themselves to signal their desired appearance to others. Individuals use hair as an expressive language to convey both their individuality and collective affiliations, and societies in turn regulate hair as a means to enforce and maintain social control, allegiance, and order. Be it conforming or rebellious, hair reflects and negotiates the social contracts between individuals and gender, racial, subcultural, and religious identities. Artist include: Meryl Meisler, John Coplans, Sara Messinger, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Melissa Stern.

Recent Press

Meryl Meisler could paraphrase this sentence: “It is to capture joy that I became a photographer.”
LA FIÈVRE DES SAMEDIS SOIR – Portfolio
M Le magazine du Monde, Clément Ghys

“In the vast panorama of American documentary photography, Meryl Meisler ‘s work stands out as a vivid fresco of New York’s urban life in the ’70s and ’80s.”
Le fotografie di New York di Meryl Meisler
FOTOGRAFIA ARTISTICA, Giuseppe Santagata

“Photos by Meryl Meisler, which orchestrate an astonishing dialogue between the euphoria of the clubs and the unsanitary streets of the Bushwick district”
Avec sa nouvelle exposition, la Philharmonie ramène le “Disco” à ses origines politiques
Harper’s BAZAAR FRANCE, Maxime Delcourt

“the photographs of Meryl Meisler bear witness to the poverty and ghettoization of large American cities”
À la Philharmonie de Paris, la facette politique du disco
Beaux Arts, Juliette Collombat

“Meryl Meisler, who captures with humanism and irony the flamboyant New York fauna of the small shady bar to the celebrity of Studio 54″
Le phénomène disco : «Cette musique n’est pas militante, c’est une caisse de résonance»
Madame Figaro, Virginie Huret

Fire Island Ice Palace membership cards are on display, while photographs by Meryl Meisler document the holiday spirit.”
« Disco. I’m coming out » : Boogie Nights
Politis, Pauline Guedj

“the dancers captured by the lenses of Michael Abramson or Meryl Meisler can enter such a state of trance and abandon”
L’éternel retour de la soirée disco
philosophie magazine, Victorine de Oliveira

“Street Walker, the latest monograph by Meryl Meisler, is a stunning exploration of social change, cultural diversity, and creative expression”
Book Excerpt: Meryl Meisler Street Walker
Hot Topic: Street Photography Behind The Lens with Meryl Meisler
Sanctuary, Myrna Beth Haskell

“Her passion for dance and nightlife remains at the heart of her art, reminding us that every moment, every smile, and every burst of laughter has the potential to become a timeless work”
La passion des samedis soir à New York à travers l’objectif de la photographe Meryl Meisler
Taste of USA, Thomas

“Meryl Meisler’s New York is at the same time decadent and intriguing.”
Meryl Meisler e sua Nova York decomposta
CULTPICKS Pitadas De Cultura

“Photography can be a way of life if you want, and Meryl has embraced that way of life with gusto.”
Spotlight: Meryl Meisler – A closer look at the street walking photographer
FLAKPHOTO, Andy Flak

“Meisler’s camera authentically documented this scene, capturing not only the excesses, but also the humanity behind the glitters, dusts, and lights.”
Meryl Meisler retrató los brillos y las sombras de los clubes nocturnos de Nueva York
CULTURA INQUIETA

“[outrageously] brilliant photography – one of New York’s finest visual storytellers, the extraordinary and quirky Meryl Meisler.”
EXPOSED In The Studio Darkroom With Meryl Meisler
The Pictorial List, Karen Ghostlaw Pomarico

The street and the camera were destined to collide. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the first photographs that managed to freeze objects in motion would be taken on the bustling streets of newly industrialized nineteenth-century cities. That era belonged to the crowd, and to the savvy navigators of the endlessly renewable theater of sidewalks and boulevards the world over, those flaneurs whom the poet Charles Baudelaire, in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” pegged as one of the nineteenth century’s most fertile archetypes. Baudelaire called for an art that would dive headfirst into the bracing water of the everyday. Impressionism followed, with its gauzy tableaux of bourgeois life, but in time it became clear that it was not the likes of Baudelaire’s titular, now-forgotten painter who were best suited to document the upheavals of the modern era. The pace of everything was quickening, and the newfangled camera was the perfect tool to slow things down, trapping the chaos in amber. Photographers became the ultimate flaneurs, shaping our collective vision as they wandered through the world.

Street pictures soon became practically synonymous with serious photography. The introduction of the fast, handheld 35mm Leica, in 1925, disencumbered roving shutterbugs from their bulky gear, allowing artists like Alexander Rodchenko to make a new kind of image that was as dynamic and spontaneous as the streets themselves. After that, it was off to the races. In 1952, inspired by the Surrealists’ obsession with chance encounters and striking juxtapositions, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the indelible phrase “the decisive moment.” There followed Robert Frank’s Beatnik-era, dirge-like book The Americans; the epochal exhibition New Documents, featuring Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, at MoMA, in 1967; the Pop art­­–adjacent work of William Eggelston, which carved out space for previously déclassé color photography in hallowed museum halls; and, finally, the postmodern turn in the late 1970s, which laid the groundwork for the innovative scenes by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall, deploying what were by then well-worn street photography tropes in the service of creating cinematic images that blended fact and fiction or were wholly fabricated for the camera.

Or anyway, that’s the usual history of street photography, made up of mostly white male Westerners. While I could have mentioned the work of photographic giants like Helen Levitt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Vivian Maier, Gordon Parks, Daidō Moriyama, Mohamed Bourouissa, or others who have a rightful place in the street photography canon, this was pretty much how the story was relayed to me, as I studied photography in college. Clearly, that blinkered history needed to make room for some heterodox voices.

A sprawling new exhibition, We Are Here: Scenes from the Streets, currently on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP), in New York, has this aim. The show, curated by Isolde Brielmaier, with the assistance of Noa Wynn, features thirty-four artists working in twenty-two different countries. Some of the work stretches back as far as the 1970s (in a show-within-a-show that the curators have dubbed “On the Shoulders of Giants,” which focuses on New York street photography), but the lion’s share of the pictures on view are from the last ten years or so. Arranged in four broad categories—street style, neighborhood and community, protest and advocacy, and urban landscapes—We Are Here strives to provide a picture of the state of street photography now(ish), and to tell us something about the state of our world as a result.

We Are Here is admirably diverse, and many of the pictures are great. Highlights include the lush, wacky, fashion-forward work that Feng Li has been making on the streets of Chengdu, China; Romuald Hazoumè’s cheeky sculptural typologies of laden bike riders in Benin; the oneiric pictures of 1990s Saint Petersburg by Alexey Titarenko; a collection of era-defining 1990s Japanese street-style pictures that Shoichi Aoki shot for his magazine FRUiTS; and exuberant pictures of children’s play in gritty 1970s New York by graffiti documentarian Martha Cooper, which elaborate on earlier projects by Helen Levitt and Arthur Leipzig. Yet the exhibition is also dogged by a nagging question: Is twenty-first-century street photography hopelessly outmoded?

Street photographers fall into essentially three sometimes overlapping camps. First are the descendants of Cartier-Bresson, who stalk the sidewalks in the hope of catching some serendipitous urban gestalt, which is either compositionally gorgeous, weirdly poignant, funny, freighted with sociopolitical import, or some combination thereof. Second are those engaged in a long-term project of social stock-taking, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, who use the street to a weave semi-personal narrative about the character of a time and place. (This place, historically, has been America, though there are notable exceptions to be found in projects like Paul Graham’s New Europe.) Third are those photographers who inflect their street photographs with their personal presence, whether formal or emotional, such that the line between the inner and outer world becomes hopelessly blurry: the photographic equivalent of New Journalism, with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander at the helm rather than Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe.

Aside from the work in We Are Here that is best described as reportage—namely the pictures of protest movements grouped together under the “protest and advocacy” subheading—much of the exhibition consists of pictures that rehash previously extant styles of street photography, but in an era that can no longer be called modern. I’ll leave it to others to tell what our era could be rightly called—“postmodern” is entirely too retro—but we can be certain that the space that most exemplifies it is no longer the street. Perhaps, as the anthropologist Marc Augé argued in his 1995 book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, it is instead one of the featureless spatial products of globalization—airports, supermarkets, shopping malls, chain hotels—that form a fractured, yet uncannily contiguous purgatory, scattered across the earth. More likely it is the space right under your nose, where you are reading this text: cyberspace.

Given the pull that the Internet has over our daily lives, it is almost shocking how little technology shows up in the pictures on view at ICP. By my count, there are only five pictures in which smartphones even appear, and just two of these show people gazing into them, perhaps the most commonplace sight in any city anywhere. Beyond that, almost none of the images contain technological tells that they were taken anytime this century. On the production end, only Michael Wolf, who made a collection of found street photographs using Google Maps, has utilized technology that would be unfamiliar to the modernists. A feeling of anachronism prevails.