When playwright Tennessee Williams reflected on the oeuvre of photographer Stephen Shore in 1982, he said, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.” The sentiment mirrors not only the power of Shore’s work but the capacity of street photography, more broadly, to provoke wonder and curiosity where we least expect it: the everyday.

Shore was among the first to adopt color photography as an artistic medium, traveling throughout America to document quotidian scenes of life in rural towns and big cities alike. His work followed behemoths of the medium like Walker Evans and Robert Frank and set the stage for others who emerged in his footsteps, including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and Martin Parr, among many others.

Stephen Shore, “El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975” (1975), photograph, chromogenic print. Museum purchase with funds donated by Scott Offen. © Stephen Shore, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Shore is included in Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which explores the ever-evolving techniques and approaches that photographers use to document people and daily life. Seminal works from the 1970s to the 1990s by Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, among others, are complemented by more recent contributions to the genre by artists like Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss.

Today, smartphones with powerful digital cameras have made photography more accessible than ever—and also completely transformed the medium. With people always unabashedly filming—taking photos, making videos, posting to social media—in the city, “photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street,” the MFA says.

The difference between snapshots and art is perhaps partly in intention, although that line is often purposely blurred. Bey’s striking “A Man and Two Women After a Church Service,” for example, captures a seemingly simple scene, yet the composition and clarity are a testament to timing and technical expertise. In what feels like simultaneously a public and private moment, the 1976 image glimpses both a particular scene and an American historical period.

Whether taken decades ago or snapped within the past few years, the images in Faces in the Crowd invite us into each experience. Luc Delahaye’s “Taxi,” for example, captures a solemn, intimate, enigmatic moment as a mother holds her young son in her arms in the back of a vehicle.

Luc Delahaye, “Taxi” (2016), photograph, chromogenic print. Museum purchase with funds donated by Richard and Lucille Spagnuolo. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s crowd photo, taken from the hip, immerses us in the thrum of a city thoroughfare. And Yolanda Andrade captures an uncanny blip when a street performer disappears behind the unsettlingly large head of a puppet. The MFA says, “Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.”

Faces in the Crowd opens on October 11 and runs through July 13, 2026. Find more on the museum’s website. You might also enjoy A Sense of Wonder, a monograph of the work of Joel Meyerowitz that was just released by SKIRA.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto “Untitled (71 1879B)” (about 1967), photograph, gelatin silver print, printed in the 1980s. Gift of David W. Williams and Eric Ceputis. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Cristobal Hara, “Cuenca (Crowded Bus)” (about 1973), photograph, gelatin silver print. Gift of Peter Soriano. © Cristóbal Hara, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Helen Levitt, “New York” (1976, printed 1993), photograph, dye transfer color print. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Graham Gund. © Helen Levitt Film Documents LLC. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Yolanda Andrade, “La revisitación o nueva revelación” (1986), silver gelatin print. Museum purchase with funds donated by Elizabeth and Michael Marcus. © Yolanda Andrade, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Joel Sternfeld, “New York City (# 1), 1976” (1976), photograph, pigment print. Gift of Ralph and Nancy Segall. © Joel Sternfeld, reproduction courtesy of Luhring Augustine Gallery. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Michael Spano, Untitled, from the ‘Diptych Series’ (1999), photograph, gelatin silver print. Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, reproduced with permission. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Matthew Connors, “Pyongyang” from the series ‘Unanimous Desires’ (2013), photograph, inkjet print. Museum purchase with funds donated by Scott Offen. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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