“Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits,” feels like an unexpected holiday gift from the Denver Art Museum, a sparkling little show that makes for a swell family outing during the celebratory season at hand. If you have friends coming from out of town and want to impress without any stress, this is a welcome option.

Bey built that kind of utility into the work. The 37 photographs on display at DAM are all about community — in this case, the Black communities of Harlem, Washington, D.C., and other Eastern cities.

Bey walked the streets of these places and captured the faces of the people who lived there. They are ordinary folks who he encountered riding their bikes or hanging out on their front porches. The photographer, working from 1988 through 1991, sought to freeze his subjects on their home turf, acting naturally, connecting however they could with his camera. In that way, the pictures are both deeply human and organically feel-good.

A kid on a bike. A mother and daughter enjoying an afternoon in a park. A woman wearing a fancy hat suitable for Sunday service. There is nothing remotely made up here; it’s just life — though isolated and elevated into art.

Bey’s photos are difficult to categorize, which is precisely the thing that made them original in their day. There were already photographers making images of this terrain when he came along. Some were photojournalists chronicling current events. Others were street photographers snapping real-world scenes on the go. Still others were finding their subjects on the streets and bringing them to studios where they could control lighting and scenery.

Bey did something in the middle of all that. His photos were shot exactly where he encountered his subjects, though they are posed, relaxed, framed in the moment. They do freeze a second in time, though these subjects are willing participants in the documentation of their lives.

What these photos show, and the thing that makes them likable, is a mutual respect between the artist and subject. Bey seems to ask little more from them other than that they stop for a minute and look at his camera. They do, each of them staring directly at his lens.

It is as if he is saying to them. “Your life is just right as it is, deserving to be seen and preserved, not altered for the world’s gaze.”

And if that practice was not proof enough to his subjects, Bey gave them an actual gift for their time. He worked with a camera that used a type of Polaroid film that simultaneously produced an instant print and a negative from which he could make more prints later in a dark room. He handed the instant prints to his subjects when the impromptu photo session was done.

There is a lot to take from each of these shots. Some are a time capsule of the era, like the photo “Poppy, Brooklyn, NY,” which depicts a solo female subject standing in front of a chain link fence, hands in pockets. She is a billboard for ’80s streetwear with her super baggy pants, hoop earrings and wide, wire-rimmed glasses. The fashion — narrow ties, skirts cinched at the hip, overalls — in these photos is a nostalgic blast.

They also seem to capture a simpler time, when people actually hung out on their stoops, when tweens roamed neighborhoods without chaperones, when more people read newspapers in print.

That is not to say that these photos simplify life as it was. They do have a small-town sheen to them, and an unpretentiousness. For example, the 1991 photo “A Girl Eating a Hot Dog,” Brooklyn, NY” shows little more than its title suggests. The same goes for the 1989 image “A Young Man In a Bandana and Swimming Trunks, Rochester, NY”: It’s just a guy on his way to the pool.

But none of the subjects — or almost none of them — are overly jovial or what you might describe as happy-go-lucky. They rarely smile, or frown. They just look.

That implies there is more going on under the surface, without the photo getting bogged down over what that might be. Were the “Young Woman with a Girl, Amityville, NY” laughing or fighting when Bey stopped them in action and asked them to pose? Was the worker captured while wearing an apron and standing next to his shoeshine stand in “Peg, Brooklyn, NY,” satisfied with his lot in life, or frustrated by it?

Probably both, right? Because life has its good days and its bad days, and life — big picture life — is the true subject of these shots.

There is one more interesting thing to note about this exhibit, organized by Eric Paddock, curator of photography for DAM, and that is its placement in the museum. By happenstance, the museum’s sixth-floor photo galleries are adjacent to the galleries that exhibit European paintings, dated from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, mostly renderings of upper-class people from that time.

That means to get to “Street Portraits,” visitors have to pass through parlors of gold-framed oil paintings of noblemen and women, queens, princes and earls. These subjects, too, are returning the gaze of the artist capturing their images. It is impossible not to see the similarities between the way that these people, in these connecting rooms — from different backgrounds, ages apart — present themselves to the world in the name of art.

It is a terrific juxtaposition, of art then and now, a stark comparison of how our ideas about whose face is worthy of the artist’s attention, and the world’s observation, has evolved. You can read both positive and negative things in the way things were, and how they are. You can also, if optimism is your method, see how art mirrors democratic changes in our global society as a whole.

Such moments can only happen in a place like DAM, one of only a handful of truly encyclopedic museums in this country with the ambition to present art from everywhere and everyone, all at once.

Often that makes a visit there a head-spinning mish-mash of periods and style. Most times, a visitor does not know where to look next.

In this case, it is a clear and concise revelation, and a reflection of the real world we occupy. I do not think anyone mapped it out to be that way, but there it is.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer who specializes in fine arts.