The idea of Wonderland conjures the fantastical, dreamy, imagination of the young. Here in the galleries, the potential of youth is highlighted in its myriad manifestations, including a great number of works generously donated to the Bronx Museum from the collection of Joseph Baio. From the vantage point of maturity, the memory of youth can read as a whispered dream in the mist, and many of the works on view here deliberately evoke that dream-like state.

The selection features classic photographers like Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson and Marianne Courville, among others, each piece with a hypnotic quality. Closer to home, the exhibition is further enriched by photographs taken by Jamel Shabazz that trace the vibrancy of New York’s youthful street life over the span of almost 30 years. From the vantage point of today, his photographs seem a distant mirror of a mode of life fading into history.

Bronx photographers Martine Fougeron and Lisa Kahane each show that the urban streets of the Bronx can become strange wonderlands of their own. Kahane’s images from the early 1980s reveal a different Bronx, strewn with grit and graffiti. Her desecrated and wounded water nymphs from a destroyed fountain become unexpectedly surreal in a landscape of urban decay. Likewise, her luxurious field of flowers on Charlotte Street becomes a place of faerie magic tucked into the most pedestrian landscape. Fougeron has been photographing her two sons intermittently for many years, and the selection presented here captures the transitional moments of adolescence – the journey from childhood to adulthood, when childish games and fantasy are often awkwardly left behind. Edward Steichen, among the world’s most famous photographers, caught that perilous moment of youthful transition in his 1932 Alice for the magazine Vanity Fair – in it, he captures the vibrant intensity of his heroine, whose vivid imagination conjures so much of the idea of living in wonderland.

Wonderland: Photographs from the Bronx Museum Permanent Collection is made possible, in part, through the generosity of the Booth Ferris Foundation.