The Way We Live Now, Street Photography by Kevin Nance

Kevin Nance is a photographer and writer in Chicago. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Gallery News and many other publications. He has had solo shows of his photography in Chicago and Lexington, Ky., and participated in group shows in cities across the U.S. More of his work—in street photography and several other genres—can be seen at kevinnance.tumblr.com.

The title of this show—recycled from a story by Susan Sontag, a great interpreter of photography—is a bit of a feint. It signals a journalistic intent, but beneath those words is a lament that street photography has always been a somewhat undervalued genre, in part because we have difficulty seeing it as art. Isn’t its function purely documentary, of the moment, and therefore bereft of the timeless quality that we look for in, say, painting or sculpture? For me, though, photojournalism and street photography are not the same thing. One tells you what happened; the other leaves you pondering why. 

—K.N.