Photography

Highlights

The Daniel Wolf Landscape Photography Collection encompasses the work of early photographers from Maine to California and gives special emphasis to Western landscapes by pioneering figures such as William Bell, W.H. Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Carleton E. Watkins. Additional 19th century holdings include important works, such as William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1845 A Scene In York and several Henry Bosse cyanotypes from the album, Views on the Mississippi River. Collectively, the museum’s works of early photography reflect both the achievements of the medium’s outstanding practitioners and the shifting environmental values of the 19th century.

Modernism also is a strength of the photography collection, and one with special affinity to artworks in other curatorial departments. Important photographs by Herbert Bayer, Jaromír Funke, Man Ray, and others express the spirit of the European modernist vision and show a remarkable command of technique perfected through experimentation. Works of American modernism by Berenice Abbott, Laura Gilpin, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others show a rich variety of responses to light, form and subject matter found in American cities as well as in wilderness.

Other photographs from the 20th century reflect changing perceptions and values, both in the art world and in the world at large. Works by Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Larry Clark find dignity, frailty, and pathos in marginalized people, while photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, and Paul Strand find poetry in the everyday lives of Latin American people. Albert Chong, Wesley Kennedy, Shirin Neshat, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz explore race and identity through their work. Our substantial collection of Robert Adams photographs addresses environmental dilemmas in the American West through plain-spoken images of human-altered landscapes, while works by Juan Enrique Bedoya explore similar issues in Peru.

Since 1950, photographers frequently have blurred the line between their medium and other artistic disciplines. Photographs by Aaron Siskind, Miloš Koreček, and Henry Holmes Smith, for example, parallel developments in Abstract Expressionist painting. Works by Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Petah Coyne, and Tom Friedman display the rich cross-fertilization that occurs when painters, sculptors and conceptual artists explore ideas through photography. And artists such as Matthew Brandt, Sharon Harper, Jungjin Lee, and Abelardo Morell discover new ways to represent landscape as a fluid and many-layered experience.