Rest, Miami Beach, Florida — a street photograph by Norman S. Carr

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts CenterWard Circle, Northwest DC

Observer: The Street Photographs of Norman S. Carr

Now showing5 September 2026 – 6 December 2026Free

Presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art: black-and-white street photographs Carr made after a forty-year legal career, building layered compositions out of reflections in DC and abroad.

Exhibition website

More in Washington, DC

On now All of October 2026

Norman Carr spent forty years as a lawyer, collecting the work of twentieth-century American photographers, before he took a camera into the street in 2000. Any DC associate billing in six-minute increments may take that as encouragement.

Early on he found his signature: reflections, which pile several layers of space into one frame. The museum compares the effect to Cubism and the dream-like world of Surrealism. Everything here is black and white, made between 2000 and 2004 in Washington and on his travels, with titles such as Convention Center Construction, Washington, D.C. and Peyote, Mexico City. You're looking at his first five years with a camera; from 2005 he worked mostly in colour, and none of that is in this show.

The Alper Initiative for Washington Art, the museum's space for the city's own art, presents it. Entry is free, Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm, closed 26 and 27 November for Thanksgiving. There's a gallery talk on Saturday 17 October, 2 to 3pm.