A look at some of photography’s less familiar byways—from business and law to science and space exploration.
New York
Art photographers over the past 50 years have taken a special interest in the ways that the medium over most of its history was not self-consciously artistic. The Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual movements enjoyed the fact that the camera is a multifunctional tool, capable of making pictures with a repetitive ease and nonjudgmental fidelity.
“Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World” at the Morgan Library & Museum argues that the many applications for the technology, from its origins until now, have been a source of inspiration for artists, whether they knew it or not.
Sharing the walls in this diverse one-room show are classic 20th-century art photographs by Eugène Atget, Brett Weston, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind, along with more contemporary images by Robert Cumming, Sophie Calle, John Baldessari, Duane Michals, John Pfahl, Nina Katchadourian, Joan Fontcuberta and others. Interspersed among them, and serving as the web that connects them, are historic photographs of weather, garment manufacture, archaeology, medicine, sociology, space exploration, land surveying, propaganda and warfare.
As most of the 85 examples come from the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., one of the truly encyclopedic photography collections in the world, the show is a treat for those who appreciate the less familiar roads that photography has taken. The co-curators, Joel Smith from the Morgan and Lisa Hostetler from the Eastman, have refined tastes for the vernacular and have found some splendid oddities.
From its beginnings, photography has been viewed as useful in business and law. William Henry Fox Talbot noted in the 1840s that his invention, the calotype, could catalog objects of Chinese porcelain “all at once” and might be helpful for insurance companies to prove ownership in case of theft.
All of the sciences have developed techniques to exploit the camera’s power to record visual data. Astronomers have relied on photography since the 1840s and can’t help making alluring images at the same time. A 1903 photogravure of three lunar craters by the French team of Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseux, and a 1967 photomosaic from NASA’s Surveyor, showing the moon’s pale surface and the probe’s shadow, are works of art even if they weren’t intended to be.
Eadweard J. Muybridge’s motion studies in the 1870s and ’80s were a catalyst for minimalist thinking about art in the 1970s. He is represented in the show by a kinky sequence in which a naked woman descends an incline with a bucket of water and empties it over another naked woman. His influence was satirically acknowledged in Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton’s “Vegetable Locomotion” from 1975. (In the example here, beets gradually pile up like a freeway multi-car crash over the 12 gridded panels.)
Also included in this section on serial imagery is a photograph of industrial architecture by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose typologies seem coolly scientific, and a multipanel story of a man sitting in a room by Mr. Michals, whose whimsical sensibility is not so cut and dried.
More startling are the small notebook-sized photographs, c. 1887, of lightning by William N. Jennings. Usually credited as the first to capture the phenomenon on film, he is shown in the sequence here to have proved that lightning has at least a dozen bizarre shapes as it illuminates the sky, none in neat zigzags as commonly depicted in paintings and cartoons of stormy nights.
Other curiosities include a page from an 1861 book titled “Ichnographs From Sandstone of Connecticut River” by James Deane. An American pioneer in photographing fossils, he has arranged these five delicate beige-to-gray salted paper prints (made by an unknown person) in an interlocking pattern that looks uncannily like a painting by Brice Marden.
In contextual shows like this, science and industrial photographers inevitably stand out because their work is so seldom exhibited in galleries and museums. The World War I images here from the U.S. Army School of Aerial Photography—including one of a student being scolded for his interpretive mistakes—entertain the mind in ways that more works by fine artists such as Siskind and Sommer can’t match.
There are exceptions. Paul Nadar was a distinguished photographer (like his more celebrated father) and an innovator. The 1889 sample of his work here is a photo-interview with Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, the revanchist French politician and general.
Spread across the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro, and taken only months after the power-hungry soldier had been condemned in absentia for treason, the sequence of six photographs presents an animated but relaxed private citizen. Such informality was new in political portraiture and highly controversial. A landmark in photojournalism, as well as p.r. and spin, it’s not to be missed.
“Sight Reading” inaugurates the first of a planned series of collaborations between the Morgan and the Eastman. As the former has not yet built a photographs collection to speak of, and the latter’s is located in a city off the normal tourist map, this arrangement should aid both institutions. To paraphrase the last line of “Casablanca,” it could be the start of a beautiful partnership.
Resource: http://www.wsj.com
New York
Art photographers over the past 50 years have taken a special interest in the ways that the medium over most of its history was not self-consciously artistic. The Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual movements enjoyed the fact that the camera is a multifunctional tool, capable of making pictures with a repetitive ease and nonjudgmental fidelity.
“Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World” at the Morgan Library & Museum argues that the many applications for the technology, from its origins until now, have been a source of inspiration for artists, whether they knew it or not.
Sharing the walls in this diverse one-room show are classic 20th-century art photographs by Eugène Atget, Brett Weston, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind, along with more contemporary images by Robert Cumming, Sophie Calle, John Baldessari, Duane Michals, John Pfahl, Nina Katchadourian, Joan Fontcuberta and others. Interspersed among them, and serving as the web that connects them, are historic photographs of weather, garment manufacture, archaeology, medicine, sociology, space exploration, land surveying, propaganda and warfare.
As most of the 85 examples come from the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., one of the truly encyclopedic photography collections in the world, the show is a treat for those who appreciate the less familiar roads that photography has taken. The co-curators, Joel Smith from the Morgan and Lisa Hostetler from the Eastman, have refined tastes for the vernacular and have found some splendid oddities.
From its beginnings, photography has been viewed as useful in business and law. William Henry Fox Talbot noted in the 1840s that his invention, the calotype, could catalog objects of Chinese porcelain “all at once” and might be helpful for insurance companies to prove ownership in case of theft.
All of the sciences have developed techniques to exploit the camera’s power to record visual data. Astronomers have relied on photography since the 1840s and can’t help making alluring images at the same time. A 1903 photogravure of three lunar craters by the French team of Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseux, and a 1967 photomosaic from NASA’s Surveyor, showing the moon’s pale surface and the probe’s shadow, are works of art even if they weren’t intended to be.
Eadweard J. Muybridge’s motion studies in the 1870s and ’80s were a catalyst for minimalist thinking about art in the 1970s. He is represented in the show by a kinky sequence in which a naked woman descends an incline with a bucket of water and empties it over another naked woman. His influence was satirically acknowledged in Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton’s “Vegetable Locomotion” from 1975. (In the example here, beets gradually pile up like a freeway multi-car crash over the 12 gridded panels.)
Also included in this section on serial imagery is a photograph of industrial architecture by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose typologies seem coolly scientific, and a multipanel story of a man sitting in a room by Mr. Michals, whose whimsical sensibility is not so cut and dried.
More startling are the small notebook-sized photographs, c. 1887, of lightning by William N. Jennings. Usually credited as the first to capture the phenomenon on film, he is shown in the sequence here to have proved that lightning has at least a dozen bizarre shapes as it illuminates the sky, none in neat zigzags as commonly depicted in paintings and cartoons of stormy nights.
Other curiosities include a page from an 1861 book titled “Ichnographs From Sandstone of Connecticut River” by James Deane. An American pioneer in photographing fossils, he has arranged these five delicate beige-to-gray salted paper prints (made by an unknown person) in an interlocking pattern that looks uncannily like a painting by Brice Marden.
In contextual shows like this, science and industrial photographers inevitably stand out because their work is so seldom exhibited in galleries and museums. The World War I images here from the U.S. Army School of Aerial Photography—including one of a student being scolded for his interpretive mistakes—entertain the mind in ways that more works by fine artists such as Siskind and Sommer can’t match.
There are exceptions. Paul Nadar was a distinguished photographer (like his more celebrated father) and an innovator. The 1889 sample of his work here is a photo-interview with Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, the revanchist French politician and general.
Spread across the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro, and taken only months after the power-hungry soldier had been condemned in absentia for treason, the sequence of six photographs presents an animated but relaxed private citizen. Such informality was new in political portraiture and highly controversial. A landmark in photojournalism, as well as p.r. and spin, it’s not to be missed.
“Sight Reading” inaugurates the first of a planned series of collaborations between the Morgan and the Eastman. As the former has not yet built a photographs collection to speak of, and the latter’s is located in a city off the normal tourist map, this arrangement should aid both institutions. To paraphrase the last line of “Casablanca,” it could be the start of a beautiful partnership.
Resource: http://www.wsj.com
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