Onto the Streets will showcase the work of an emergent generation of British photographers, notable for their fresh, candid depictions of public life in London.

The history of street photography in Paris and New York is well known. Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Brassaï, Frank, Erwitt and Winogrand are among those particularly celebrated for their ability to capture the unique flux of people, matter and imagery that combine at street level.

In the last ten years London has become a centre for creative street photography. Photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Jason Evans and Juergen Teller created a much imitated ‘London look’ in the 1990s using the street as a stage for fashion photography. Meanwhile Gillian Wearing’s street-based documentary project Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say became one of the most fascinating social and historical documents of Britain in the early 1990s.

Now a new generation of practitioners are returning to the idea of the ‘decisive moment’.

Keenly aware of the history of the genre, photographers such as Matt Stuart, Nick Turpin and Nils Jorgensen insist on the continued relevance of still photography to capture fleeting moments of social interaction or collisions of line and form in the public places where we work, shop and play. Their observations of the dynamics of street life in London hold up a mirror to the kind of society we are making for ourselves. If we have become workers and shoppers, our lives about earning and spending; if our families are separated and our neighbours are strangers; if our media are focused on celebrity, sex and sport, where can we look to be shown the state we are in? It is in images made right on the streets that we are best able see the mixed blessings of life in a democratic, free market economy.