Columbus Museum of Art » Photography

Jill and I

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:27:48 +0000

Tina Barney’s work stands in contrast to the work of her predecessors in social documentary photography, especially the work of those who have documented the poor and working classes. Among the first professional photographers to record the lives of America’s established upper classes, Barney concentrates on selected family members and friends, photographing them in close-up and in the large-scale format she helped to pioneer in the 1980s. The stance and gaze of the subjects and the composition and cropping of the photographs invite the viewer to participate in understanding the private worlds of Barney’s subjects.

Weed Against Sky

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:24:52 +0000

A bold innovator and respected teacher, Harry Callahan believed that photography had the power not only to record the world but also to construct other realities. He found great meaning in his highly personal responses and relationships to the subjects he photographed. This image is one of a series of nature studies he began in the late 1940s. Here, he has used high-contrast printing to eliminate middle tones, and thus some details, in order to emphasize the starkly elegant calligraphy of the weed.

Andalusia

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:21:25 +0000

Drawn into the circle of the French Surrealists, Henri Cartier-Bresson came to share their belief in the capacity of photography to undermine accepted ideas about reality. In the early 1930s, he made an acclaimed series of photo- graphs of the poor and the dispossessed in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. In making these images, Cartier-Bresson perfected his idea of the “decisive moment,” his characterization of the style that became his trademark. “Above all,” he once said, “I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of a single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unfolding itself before my eyes.” Here, the flattening effect of the camera has produced an unexpected image in which the boys seem to be enveloped in graffiti.

Girl and Jar—San Ildefonso

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:18:25 +0000

Edward Curtis spent many years recording the disappearance of Native-American populations, peoples who by Curtis’s time were gathered on reservations and suffering from the lingering effects of war, disease, and malnutrition. Curtis worked methodically and tirelessly (his work was eventually published in some two hundred volumes), seeking to represent the physical and spiritual essence of each subject’s own culture. This young woman was called Morning Flower. She carries a jar on her head in a manner characteristic of the women of her tribe. Curtis’s treatment of his subjects ranged from straight, non-glamorized presentation to earnest romanticism.

Untitled (Burroughs Family Cabin, Hale County, Alabama)

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:11:36 +0000

Walker Evans, one of the very influential photographers of the twentieth century, radically expanded the possibilities of photography as an art form. As a photographer for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1938, Evans documented the rural poverty of the Great Depression. In the summer of 1936, Evans collaborated with writer James Agee on Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of Alabama sharecropper families. This photograph from that project shows the washbasin and meticulously clean dining area of the Burroughs home. The careful composition of vertical and horizontal elements is exemplary of Evans’s classic style.

Ohio Penitentiary, Death Row

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:08:17 +0000

Masumi Hayashi began photographing prisons in 1989, producing work that united her interests in archeology, confinement, and abandoned places. Assembling many separate views of a subject into large-scale photographs, she creates complex and often disorienting new spaces. This panorama combines fifty-five single images into a powerful evocation of the experiences of imprisonment. Hayashi’s was among the last of the artistic projects that focused on the now demolished Ohio Penitentiary.

Grabbing, Snatching, Blink and You Be Gone

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:05:21 +0000

Carrie Mae Weems’s art addresses issues of ethnic, racial, and gender identity. Exploring the complexity of history and contemporary life, Weems has sought to uncover both the African and the American cultural origins of African- American heritage. This triptych is of Gorée Island, off the coast of Dakar, from Weems’s Slave Coast series. For Weems, Gorée symbolizes the slave trade as a point of connection to many places and tribes in Africa. Her photograph of this last of the many, grim holding facilities built for use in the trade captures a haunting and timeless presence, while at the same time insisting on the present- day existence of the structure and its location.

Butterfly Boy, New York

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:00:34 +0000

Jerome Liebling, a distinguished photographer and teacher, made this picture in 1949, two years after he joined the Photo League. The stance of the little boy marks the center of the picture, his sharp gaze is directed precisely at the viewer, and his outstretched arms afford him a grand presence on his stretch of urban sidewalk. The details of his clothing—oversized shirt, mismatched and mislaced shoes, summer shorts with a winter coat—contradict but do not undermine his confidence. The open coat, a familiar gesture of childhood, signals both vulnerability and fantasy, as does the title. He is anonymous but unforgettable.