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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Photography on Photography. Reflections on the Medium since 1960

from : MET | The Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York, USA

Exhibition Dates: April 8 – October 19, 2008
Exhibition Location: Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern

Photography Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960, on view from April 8 through October 19, 2008, is the second exhibition in the Museum’s new gallery for contemporary photographs. Photography on Photography presents fourdecades of photographs by artists in the permanent collection who have madephotography itself their subject and taken aim at its claims of objectivity and itsubiquity in modern life. Featured in the exhibition are works by Vito Acconci, William Anastasi, Lutz Bacher, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Sherrie Levine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Allen Ruppersberg, Karin Sander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Andy Warhol, as well as recently acquired photographsby Moyra Davey, Kota Ezawa, Janice Guy, Josephine Pryde, James Welling, Christopher Williams, and Mark Wyse.

“Our inaugural installation was intended to introduce the general audience to many of the different strands of contemporary photography that interest us,” said Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, “This new selection takes a narrower focus, showing how photographers since Conceptual Art havereflected on the medium itself in their work. With many more works by younger artists,this installation also provides more of a snapshot of where photography is at themoment.”

By 1960, photography had permeated every corner of American culture, and artistsbegan to use the camera to break down the boundaries between art and life and thehierarchies between mediums. Andy Warhol and Vito Acconci each chose the popular automated photo-booth as a means to reveal how ideas of the self are produced in theact of being photographed. Using the newly invented instant print camera, in 1967 William Anastasi covered an actual mirror with pictures of the mirror beingphotographed. In this allegory of the changing status of the photographic image, theperceptual gap between the object and its photograph has been all but erased.

In the late 1970s, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine began appropriating thephotographs of others and claiming them as their own. Levine’s reproductions of Walker Evans’s famous Depression-era photographs disrupt notions of originality while conveying a sense of lost illusions and an inability to recapture the past. Prince’sstrategies of manipulating found images—cropping, enlarging, grouping according to gesture or pose, and re-photographing black-and-white advertisements using colorfilm—undermine the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the generic mass cultural image, revealing it to be a fiction of society’s desires.In the face of the recent rise of digital photography, some artists have chosen to wed a Conceptual approach with the “slow” techniques of analog photography.

In a 2001 photograph, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s careful framing, long exposure, and large-view cameramagically animate a wax effigy of Fidel Castro, thereby reviving that which is passing from history—including, perhaps, the artist’s own “old-fashioned” photography techniques. James Welling’s new series of large flower pictures is also an exuberant display of technical wizardry in the darkroom. The artist’s use of gels and filters to transform black-and-white negatives into prints with glowing, hallucinatory colors can be seen as a rebuff to the surfeit of digitally manipulated photography. The exhibition concludes with the work of younger artists for whom conceptualism and the craft of photography are not mutually exclusive.

In Josephine Pryde’s Photography on PhotographyPage 3meditation on time and aging, Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Advanced Time ComplexCapsules (14 Day Course), photography is complicit in a desire to turn back the clock on death and decay. Her work forgoes digital manipulation; instead, extending thetradition of photography is as important to her as questioning it. Mark Wyse makestechnically assured, enigmatic images showing traces of past life or activity. The 2006 photograph included in this exhibition, Marks of Indifference #1 (Shelf), focuses on the jagged black lines left after shelves have been ripped from the white walls. The image isan apt metaphor for photography itself: a mute presence standing in for an absence.Photography on Photography is organized by Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator in theDepartment of Photographs. The exhibition will also be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.

VISITOR INFORMATION
Hours Fridays and Saturdays 9:30 a.m.-9:00 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays–Thursdays9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Met Holiday Mondays in the Main Building: May 26 and September 1, 2008
Sponsored by Bloomberg 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.All other Mondays closed; Jan. 1, Thanksgiving, and Dec. 25 closed
Suggested Admission (Includes Main Building and The Cloisters on the Same Day)
Adults $20.00, seniors (65 and over) $15.00, students $10.00
Members and children under 12 accompanied by adult free
Advance tickets available at www.TicketWeb.com or 1-800-965-4827.
For More Information (212) 535-7710; www.metmuseum.orgNo extra charge for any exhibition.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Communications Department1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel (212) 570-3951 fax (212) 472-2764 communications@metmuseum.org

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