Zoe Strauss’s photography is closely identified with her home city, Philadelphia, even though she has made images in many other locales. Committed to making her images broadly accessible outside conventional art channels, she began displaying and selling them in a single-day exhibition held annually from 2001 and 2010 under an Interstate 95 overpass in South Philadelphia. Her project and her intimate, unflinching pictures soon attracted critical attention, an invitation to exhibit at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and comparisons to such photographers as Walker Evans and Nan Goldin. The retrospective exhibition Zoe Strauss: Ten Years premiered at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2012 and traveled to the International Center of Photography in New York in 2013. Its body of work revealed Strauss’s “unique ability to transform the quotidian or even ugly into something extraordinary” as she “exposes the invisible class … and in doing so, demands our attention” (Village Voice).

Strauss discussed her relationship with Philadelphia and her use of photography and political outreach to engage wider audiences and revive troubled urban neighborhoods in an October lecture at the Academy presented in conjunction with the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics. Her talk coincided with the opening of the AAR exhibition A View of One’s Own—Three Women Photographers in Rome. Like the exhibition itself, Strauss’s talk was part of FOTOGRAFIA, Festival Internazionale di Roma.