Smokers and Sleepers

Photographer Jerome Mallmann has captured images of New Yorkers in unguarded moments since the late 1960s. Images in this exhibition organized by the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art) show a dispossessed population, those driven or escaping to the streets of New York to indulge in the compulsion to smoke or the need to sleep. The works are the result of twenty years of photography, always with small cameras, fast film, and without a flash, in order to intrude as little as possible into subjects' lives. Candid and spontaneous, the photographs capture the complex rituals and terrifying realities of life on the streets of New York.

Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Photographer Jerome Mallmann has captured images of New Yorkers in unguarded moments since the late 1960s. Images in this exhibition organized by the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art) show a dispossessed population, those driven or escaping to the streets of New York to indulge in the compulsion to smoke or the need to sleep. The works are the result of twenty years of photography, always with small cameras, fast film, and without a flash, in order to intrude as little as possible into subjects' lives. Candid and spontaneous, the photographs capture the complex rituals and terrifying realities of life on the streets of New York.

Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Jerome Mallmann, born in Kohler, Wisconsin in 1931, studied French and art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then pursued these interests traveling to Paris and taking painting classes in San Francisco at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). After 1967 he became interested in the art of photography, especially street photography, and now regularly shows his work at the Camera Club of New York.