Photography exhibit is about process as well as the images
BY KERI GUTEN COHEN
FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER
April 28, 2006
Whip out that camera phone and you're instantly a photographer. Download the image to your computer and you're capable of sophisticated manipulations ranging from cropping to altering colors to adding textures.
That's how it is in this modern digital age, but really, it's not all that much different from what history's earliest photographers did when they left behind their artistic sensibilities even as they were discovering the photographic process.
That's a key concept behind "Rethinking the Photographic Image: The Best of Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection," a major survey exhibition running through June 25 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
"What we mean by 'rethinking' happens in several different ways," says UMMA director James Christen Steward. "There is no single history of photography -- it's an ever-changing construct that shifts as our own history shifts."
"We've also tried to emphasize the interventionist nature of making a photograph," Steward says. Though many viewers consider photographs as authentic documents of a moment in time, "there are always conscious decisions -- how an image is cropped, how people are posed, how long of an exposure. This challenges the notion that photography is a more impersonal and impartial media than painting and sculpture."
Keep that in mind as you view the more than 250 images from the vast collections and resources of the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., acknowledged as one of the world's most comprehensive collections of photography and film. The depth and breadth of that collection is evident from the ghostly daguerreotypes of the 1830s to the contemporary works that include digital photography and a video installation. You'll recognize many familiar images on the walls.
The exhibition is arranged chronologically, with the larger of the two gallery spaces devoted to black-and-white and sepia-toned images roughly through World War II. This broad stretch of history shows the development of the photographic process as well as the ever-present hand of the artist.
Take British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, for example. She received her first camera as a gift at age 48, then began photographing those around her, from maids to those in her wealthy social circle. Her images from the 1860s purposefully reflect her keen interest in the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo, and her dramatic lighting imbues her portraits with a painterly quality.
Her work stands in contrast to the more well-known, straightforward, formal portrait of Abraham Lincoln by Mathew Brady, who photographed nearly 20 U.S. presidents (not all while in office) and was the first to document the devastation of the Civil War.
The survey takes viewers through various periods in photography's history -- early experimentation, painterly expressions, documentation and shaping of history (mostly industry and wars) and contemporary experimentation.
Take your time and read the text accompanying the photographs, which contain compelling nuggets of information. For example, did you know William N. Jennings captured the first image of lightning in 1882?
In a show with this much depth, it's impossible to hit all the highlights, but watch for these gems:
Alvin Langdon Coburn's poetic vision of New York's Flat Iron Building (1912); Lewis W. Hine's portraits of the American worker and construction of the Empire State Building (1930s); Edward Steichen's intense portrait of actress Gloria Swanson (1924); Dr. Harold E. Edgerton's image capturing a bullet blasting in and out of an apple (1938); Carrie Mae Weems' "Magenta Colored Girl" (1987); Bill Jacobson's blurred, anonymous images of those with AIDS (1995), and the ongoing yearly portraits of the changing faces of the "Brown Sisters" begun 25 years ago by U-M graduate Nicholas Nixon.
Don't miss the eerie, mysterious painterly work by British photographer Andy Lock in the museum's apse. His luminous green images of abandoned public housing flats are about process as well as expression.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
