CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/15/2023

Discreetly poetic: 'Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City'

“Girl with Bicycle, in the Coombe, Dublin” (1966) is reproduced from Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City, published to accompany the critically-acclaimed exhibition originating at the High Museum of Art, now en route to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for a September 16 opening. Organized around Hofer’s renowned but often overlooked photobooks and reviewed this week in the New York Review of Books, this is the first major American museum exhibition in more than 50 years. “Through her remarkable books, Hofer pioneered a quietly lyrical manner of photography that eschews visual tricks or contrived drama,” High Museum curator Gregory J. Harris writes. “This openness to her subjects’ inherent gravitas and to the richness of a prosaic setting comes through in one of her most striking portraits, that of a young girl posed at an empty intersection in the Coombe in Dublin. The young Dubliner stands on her tiptoes, over¬whelmed by a bike that is several sizes too large for her, a drawn expression on her face. There was no need for Hofer to impose an agenda on the situation to conjure a poignant visual experience. She remem-bered, ‘It is all just right the way it is: the clouds and the sadness.’ Though she was impeccably inten¬tional in making her photographs, she seemed to feel very little need to overly orchestrate them and was masterful at turning the most mundane situations into discretely poetic records of what was simply there before her camera.”