Bright Lights, Big City

Bright Lights, Big City
March 7th to May 25th, 2024
Iconic Images Gallery
16 Waterloo Place
Piccadilly
London
SW1Y 4AR

Iconic Images Gallery, London presents their first exhibition of the year, Bright Lights, Big City, featuring more than a dozen renowned photographers whose work captures the glamour, grime, connection and isolation that defines the metropolitan experience in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The cities of the 20th century thrummed like magnets, drawing in their population
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.

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.

“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.”

Bright Lights, Big City opens on March 7th until May 25th, 2024 at Iconic Images Gallery

©2024 Iconic Images