Exhibition: ‘Ruth Asawa: Retrospective’ at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Exhibition dates: 9th March – 13th September, 2026

Curators: Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.363, Freestanding Basket)
c. 1948
Copper wire
4 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 7 3/4 in. (11.4 x 19.1 x 19.7cm)
Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina. Black Mountain College Collection
Museum purchase with funds provided by 2010 Collectors’ Circle with additional funds provided by Frances Myers
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo courtesy Christie’s

I have always admired Ruth Asawa’s work.

There are some beautiful photographs of her wire sculptures on display in various exhibitions; of Asawa in her home with her work. Imagine living in such a home surrounded by your creations, continuous form within a form within the home as her studio. A nest of creativity, comfort and production.

What beauty and natural energy emanates from the soul of this work, work which contains ideas of transparency, continuity, and space. For the artist a way of growing and being as one with the energy of the world.

“Everything is connected, continuous.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

“I was interested in wire because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realised that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

“My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”

Ruth Asawa

“What’s exceptional about Asawa’s practice is the multiplicity of her artistic pursuits and the marvellous ability to turn the simplest things into subjects of lifelong creative contemplation. The exhibition aims to offer multiple points of entry into her work, reflecting what Asawa described as the ‘total act’ of artmaking.”

Cara Manes, curator of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

Across mediums and all stages of her practice, Asawa explored continuity, transparency, and the interchangeability of seemingly contradictory concepts like figure and ground, and abstraction and representation. She first articulated these core ideas at Black Mountain College (BMC), a multidisciplinary school with a sensory- and materials-based curriculum that she attended in 1946-49. There, Asawa took courses in mathematics, philosophy, music, and dance. She studied art under Josef Albers, among others, from whom she learned “how to see,” as she later put it.

Asawa’s early drawings, paintings, and wire works in this section took inspiration from natural forms and mathematical patterns, among other sources. A formative trip to Mexico in 1947 introduced Asawa to wire baskets and weaving techniques, which was a major turning point in her own work. By the time she left BMC in 1949, she had made an important discovery. “I continued one basket into a closed form and slowly, while learning to control the medium, began to realize the exciting potential in this way of making sculpture.”

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (BMC.52, Dancers)
c. 1948-49
Oil on paper
48.3 x 30.5cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (BMC.58, Meander – Curved Lines)
c. 1948
Ink on paper
41.9 x 55.9cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; photo courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.691, Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes)
1951
Ink on paper
176.5 x 73.7 x 5.7cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of the Cuneo Family
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

In the early 1950s Asawa took classes in dance, commercial design, lettering, screenprinting, and painting at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). In these years her work continued to gain local and national attention through exhibitions at the San Francisco and New York showrooms of the interior design company Laverne Originals, and in publications including Vogue.

During this period Asawa made a range of designs for commercial work, including plastic panels based on her paperfolds and wallpaper and textile patterns incorporating logarithmic spiral forms, the Black Mountain College (BMC) laundry stamp, and the footprints of her young children. Although Laverne Originals invited Asawa to mass-produce her looped-wire baskets as home decor, she declined. She explained: “I am interested in producing to sell, but the more I work the more ideas I get and I want to experiment, but experimenting is not producing, since there are always many flops.”

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.427, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form)
1953
Brass wire
18 x 28 x 28 in. (45.7 x 71.1 x 71.1 cm)
Collection Don Kaul and Barbara Bluhm-Kaul, Chicago
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: Maris Hutchinson, courtesy David Zwirner

“These sculptures are made of a continuous wire … enclosing volumes transparently … and producing forms within forms. … The wire must be continuous and the hollow shapes can only be shapes that grow this way.”

~ Ruth Asawa

In 1949 Asawa moved to San Francisco, which became her permanent home. Following California’s repeal of laws prohibiting interracial marriage, she married architect and fellow Black Mountain alumnus, Albert Lanier, and together they started a family. In tandem Asawa began building her art career, dedicating herself full-time to experiments with form building both in space with her looped-wire sculptures and on a flat plane in drawings and prints.

Asawa’s unyielding search for new possibilities within her chosen processes resulted in her signature sculptural motif: a “continuous form within a form,” which she described as “a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.” In a single lobe, a sequence of spheres encloses one another, creating one uninterrupted surface. Asawa would continue to elaborate on this motif for decades to come, foregrounding continuity as a through line for her work. “You can show inside and outside, and inside and outside are connected,” she said. “Everything is connected, continuous.”

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.797, Hanging Two-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form)
c. 1954
Steel wire
49.5 x 38.7 x 38.7cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Second Lobes)
1955, refabricated 1957-58
Brass and steel wire
162.2 x 37.9 x 37.9cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of Howard Lipman
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (AB.029, Continuous Form Within a Form)
1956
Acrylic on Masonite
83.8 x 109.2cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (ZP.16B, Twelve Looped-Wire Sculptural Forms)
mid- to late 1950s
Screentone on mat board
25.4 x 61cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: James Paonessa

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.433, Hanging Nine Open Hyperbolic Shapes Joined Laterally)
c. 1958
Copper wire
193 x 38.1 x 38.1cm
William Roth Estate
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: Laurence Cuneo

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.039, Hanging Five Spiraling Columns of Open Windows)
c. 1959-1960
Monel wire
213.4 x 61 x 61cm
de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Gift of the artist
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., Courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: Laurence Cuneo

Asawa’s famous quote, “My home was and is my studio,” encapsulates her philosophy of seamlessly integrating family life and artistic creation, where her San Francisco home became a living, breathing art space filled with family, projects, and her iconic hanging wire sculptures. Taking inspiration from this motif, this gallery brings together works in different mediums from across the arc of Asawa’s career, alongside works by her lifelong friends, and pays testament to her boundless practice.

The heart of the Asawa-Lanier Noe Valley house was its cathedral-like main living space, which boasted south-facing windows and a double-height ceiling measuring over five meters tall. The space was filled with objects reflective of the constant creative activity the artist encouraged in her children and guests to the home. Its walls featured her own work along with art by friends including Josef Albers, among others. Its shelves displayed pots by Marguerite Wildenhain as well as art books. The most distinguishing feature of her living room was the spectacular array of Asawa’s wire sculptures suspended from the open overhead beams.

Both within and outside her home and studio, Asawa never stopped working: She sketched and drew her surroundings, coiled or bundled wire in preparation for the next sculpture, folded paper for origami, and welcomed other artists, educators, and advocates for continued collaborations.

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.046a-d, Hanging Group of Four, Two-Lobed Forms)
1961
Copper and brass wire
(a): 152.4 x 43.2 x 17.8cm
(b): 53.3 x 30.5 x 30.5cm
(c): 81.3 x 33 x 33cm
(d): 104.1 x 40.6 x 40.6cm
Collection of Diana Nelson and John Atwater
Promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: Laurence Cuneo

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.184, Hanging Tied-Wire, Single-Stem, Multi-Branched Form Based on Nature)
c. 1962
Galvanized steel wire
76.2 x 101.6 x 101.6cm
Collection of Diana Nelson and John Atwater
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Poppy (TAM.1479)
1965
Lithograph
76.4 x 52.2cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: © 2015 MoMA, NY

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S.451, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Six-Branched Form Based on Nature)
c. 1965
Brass and copper wire
63.5 x 73.7 x 19.1cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: Dan Bradica, courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (SD.017, Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Open Pentagon in Center)
1980s to mid-1990s
Ink on paper
46.4 x 66cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: James Paonessa

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (WC.090, Voodoo Lily)
1990
Ink and watercolour on paper
63.5 x 48.26cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Over the course of her career, Asawa tirelessly returned to depicting plants and flowers, tracing the shapes of irises, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, and other flora from her garden in sketchbooks and works on paper. For Asawa, drawing from life was more than simple observation; it became a value and mode of engaging with the world and present moment. “Life draws,” she once wrote, expressing how the events and objects around her defined her work.

In 1985 Asawa was diagnosed with lupus and for nearly a year her physical capacity was significantly reduced, but her creative spirit remained undiminished. In the last decades of her career, she concentrated her creative output on botanical drawings, some of which are gathered in this section. These intimate works, at times extremely realistic, at others abstract, often began with a gesture of generosity: gifts of plants from the artist’s friends and family, after whom many works are titled – such as Albert’s Bouquet from the Garden (1999) or Valentine Bouquet from Adam (1991), referring to her son who often tended his parents’ flowering plants during their later years. Through the daily routine of recording the natural world around her, Asawa documented the extended community she shared it with, as well as the passage of time.

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Valentine Bouquet from Adam (PF.555)
1991
Ink on paper
31.8 x 58.4cm
Private collection
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner
Photo: James Paonessa

Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a six decade-long career, this exhibition traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative practice of an iconic artist. Ruth Aiko Asawa (b. 1926, Norwalk, California, USA; d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) integrated her creative work with all aspects of her life as an artist, educator and arts advocate. This interconnectedness is illuminated in photographs and ephemera presented alongside and in response to the works featured here, from the suspended looped-wire sculptures for which she is best known to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. Challenging distinctions between abstraction and representation, figure and ground, and negative and positive space, her work invites us to contemplate how disparate elements interact in a composition, which in turn engages with its surroundings.

Asawa was the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were forcibly incarcerated by the United States government because of their Japanese ancestry. In 1946, after being denied an art teaching degree because of anti Japanese prejudice, she enrolled at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the school’s democratic environment, she forged a creative path grounded in experimentation and an ethos of hard, continuous work. From her time at Black Mountain through the end of her life in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949, Asawa situated her artistic practice within set parameters to investigate ideas of transparency, continuity, and space. In the 1960s, she also expanded her life’s work to directly engage her community through public commissions, arts education, and civic advocacy.

Taking its cue from the artist’s multifaceted work, this retrospective charts Asawa’s career and legacy, highlighting her ceaseless experimentation with material and form evident in her radical innovations.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Text from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Ruth Asawa: Retrospective' at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, March - September, 2026

Installation views of the exhibition Ruth Asawa: Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, March – September, 2026

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao proudly presents Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, an ambitious exhibition devoted to an iconic artist, Ruth Aiko Asawa (born Norwalk, California, 1926 ; died San Francisco, California, 2013) in the year that would have been her 100th birthday.

Asawa was one of the most uniquely gifted and productive artists to emerge in the postwar era in the United States. While the appreciation of her work has grown exponentially in the last decade, this international retrospective is the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s exquisite, varied, and groundbreaking practice.

Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a six-decade-long career, this exhibition traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative practice of Ruth Asawa, who integrated her creative work with all aspects of her life as an artist, educator and arts advocate. This interconnectedness is illuminated in photographs and ephemera presented alongside and in response to the works featured in this exhibition, from the suspended looped-wire sculptures for which she is best known to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints.

Challenging distinctions between abstraction and representation, figure and ground, and negative and positive space, her work invites us to contemplate how disparate elements interact in a composition, which in turn engages with its surroundings.

Asawa was the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were forcibly incarcerated by the United States government because of their Japanese ancestry. In 1946, after being denied an art teaching degree because of anti-Japanese prejudice, she enrolled at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the school’s democratic environment, she forged a creative path grounded in experimentation and an ethos of hard work. From her time at Black Mountain through the end of her life in San Francisco , where she moved in 1949, Asawa situated her artistic practice within set parameters to investigate ideas of transparency, continuity, and space. In the 1960s, she also expanded her life’s work to directly engage her community through public commissions, arts education, and civic advocacy.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Following its presentation at SFMOMA, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the exhibition will then travel to Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland. International exhibition tour supported by The Henry Luce Foundation.

Press release continued below…

Installation views of the exhibition Ruth Asawa: Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, March – September, 2026

Exhibition overview

“How To See”: Black Mountain College, 1940s

Across mediums and all stages of her practice, Ruth Asawa explored continuity, transparency, and the interchangeability of seemingly contradictory concepts like figure and ground, and abstraction and representation. She first articulated these core ideas at Black Mountain College (BMC), a multidisciplinary school with a sensory – and materials – based curriculum that she attended in 1946-49. There, Asawa took courses in mathematics, philosophy, music, and dance. She studied art under Josef Albers, among others, from whom she learned “how to see,” as she later put it.

Untitled (BMC.52, Dancers), c. 1948-49, features abstract dancing figures inspired by dance classes that Asawa took from Merce Cunningham and with Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn in her final year at BMC. The work is composed of layered rounded forms on a yellow ground, and it was a precursor to the artist’s wire sculptures of the 1950s. Moreover, a formative trip to Mexico in 1947 introduced Asawa to wire baskets and weaving techniques, which was a major turning point in her own work. By the time she left BMC in 1949, she had made an important discovery: “I continued one basket into a closed form and slowly, while learning to control the medium, began to realise the exciting potential in this way of making sculpture.”

Commercial Designs, early 1950s

In the early 1950s Ruth Asawa took classes in dance, commercial design, lettering, screenprinting, and painting at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). In these years her work continued to gain local and national attention through exhibitions at the San Francisco and New York showrooms of the interior design company Laverne Originals, and in publications including Vogue. During this period Asawa made a range of designs for commercial work, including plastic panels based on her paperfolds and wallpaper and textile patterns incorporating logarithmic spiral forms, the Black Mountain College (BMC) laundry stamp, and the footprints of her young children. Although Laverne Originals invited Asawa to mass produce her looped-wire baskets as home decor, she declined. She explained: “I am interested in producing to sell, but the more I work the more ideas I get and I want to experiment, but experimenting is not producing, since there are always many flops.”

“Everything is connected”: Forms within Forms, 1950s

~ Ruth Asawa

In 1949 Ruth Asawa moved to San Francisco, which became her permanent home. Following California’s repeal of laws prohibiting interracial marriage, she married architect and fellow Black Mountain alumnus, Albert Lanier, and together they started a family. In tandem Asawa began building her art career, dedicating herself full-time to experiments with form building both in space with her looped-wire sculptures and on a flat plane in drawings and prints.

Asawa’s unyielding search for new possibilities within her chosen processes resulted in her signature sculptural motif: a “continuous form within a form,” which she described as “a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.” In a single lobe, a sequence of spheres encloses one another, creating one uninterrupted surface. Among those examples featured in this section include Untitled (S.427, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), 1953; and Untitled (S.797, Hanging Two-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1954. Asawa continued to elaborate on this motif for decades to come, foregrounding continuity as a thorough line for her work. “You can show inside and outside, and inside and outside are connected,” she said. “Everything is connected, continuous.”

“Vocabulary of My Sculpture”

“The work is one which dictates a way of growing and the more one learns about this way of growing the more possibilities are opened up for the creating of sculpture peculiar to the process.”

~ Ruth Asawa

The works on view in this section offer a partial inventory of the vast array of sculptural forms Ruth Asawa invented throughout the 1950s using industrially sourced, wire that she looped by hand – what she described in 1955 as the “vocabulary of my sculpture.” These forms by turns layer, nest, interlock, ruffle, and cascade, creating continuous surfaces that delineate volume while remaining porous to surrounding space. Though their composite structures are symmetrical and balanced, the viewer’s experience of their shapes can change depending on the vantage point and proximity to other works.

Asawa used her looped-wire technique to make “sculpture that would itself have a form and volume, whose silhouette would also have volume, and sculptures whose shadow would have volume.” Most of the works in this section were chosen by Asawa to be exhibited in a sequence of solo shows at Peridot Gallery in New York in the 1950s, which introduced her art to a broader audience. Considered together, they shed light on the iterative nature of the artist’s practice. Among those works featured is Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Second Lobes), 1955, re-fabricated in 1957-58, which contains multiple connected lobes that form long sculptural silhouettes while the interior elements, such as the scones or spheres, create overlapping layers.

The Tamarind Prints, 1965

The Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded by June Wayne in Los Angeles in 1960 and vastly expanded the possibilities of fine art lithography in the United States. At the suggestion of her former teacher Josef Albers, who had previously printed there himself, Asawa was invited to do a residency for two months in 1965. During her short time there, she worked closely with seven printers to produce fifty-four radically experimental prints.

Asawa’s unique prints featured family members, flowers, plane trees, and chairs, as well as abstractions, of which some are on view in this section, including Poppy (TAM.1479), 1965, a virtuoso depiction of California’s delicate state flower. While never again focusing as intensively on printmaking as she did during her time at Tamarind, Asawa remained convinced of the merits of the medium, resisting “the myth that the crafts and printmaking are less important than painting and sculpture. A good piece is important regardless of category.”

Nature, Tied Wire and Later Sculpture, 1960s-1990s

“Nature is my teacher, and I have used materials that are a product of our twentieth century to study her growth patterns.”

~ Ruth Asawa

In 1962 a gift of a dried desert plant from Death Valley given to Ruth Asawa inspired her to pursue a new direction in her sculpture. Drawing the plant, she found “its intricacy … made it impossible,” and instead turned to wire, working with bundles and spools that she manipulated into complex branches and other botanical forms, as seen in Untitled (S.184, Hanging Tied-Wire, Single-Stem, Multi-Branched Form Based on Nature), c. 1962. Asawa went on to make “tied-wire” sculptures over the course of the decade and beyond. As she described, these works “take an impersonal material like wire, which is very hard, and then make it into a gentle thing that’s natural looking so that you can take an abstract piece of wire and turn it into a plant. And I like the transition from hard to soft.”

Asawa’s tied-wire works often began with a floral, starlike, or geometric centre, as seen in Untitled (S.451, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Six-Branched Form Based on Nature), c. 1965. As she worked, and the form grew progressively outward, she both responded to the properties of her medium in following “what the wire dictates” and mirrored patterns in the natural world. Her hanging and wall-mounted sculpture also reinvigorated her drawing, which like her works in wire explored new possibilities in geometric designs, airy blooms, and branching tree-like patterns, as seen in Untitled (SD.017, Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Open Pentagon in Center), 1980s to mid-1990s.

Throughout the 1970s and beyond, Asawa continued “to explore the limits of materials, growth, and form by making sculpture with wire.” As she created new variations of looped- and tied-wire compositions, some closed and some open, some suspended from above and others wall-mounted, she also furthered her material exploration of resin and experimented with coloured glass.

Public Art and Public Commissions, 1960s-1990s

In 1968 Ruth Asawa began advocating for the role of art in society through her tenures on the San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also expanded her art practice into San Francisco’s civic life through public artworks and commissions “to make a sculpture that could be enjoyed by everyone.” These works, often collaborative in nature, became places where communities could gather for moments of remembrance and celebration. This section explores Asawa’s expanded engagement with her community through art, arts education and civic advocacy, drawing on artwork, video, photographs, archival documentation and other ephemera.

Her first outdoor commission was the bronze fountain Andrea (1968) in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Responding to the waterfront location, she delivered a sculpture of two mermaids, one of whom holds an infant, surrounded by frogs and turtles.

Other large-scale works include her Origami Fountains (1975-76) at San Francisco’s Nihonmachi Pedestrian Mall, which explore her long interest in origami and paper folding. In 1994, Asawa debuted her monumental Japanese American Internment Memorial, commissioned by the City of San José. Created in collaboration with her artist-son Paul Lanier and artist Nancy Thompson, this sculpture more directly addressed personal and shared stories of the unlawful incarceration of people of Japanese descent during World War II.

“Life Draws”: From the Garden, 1980s-2000s

Over the course of her career, Ruth Asawa tirelessly returned to depicting plants and flowers, tracing the shapes of irises, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, and other flora from her garden in sketchbooks and works on paper. For Asawa, drawing from life was more than simple observation; it became a value and mode of engaging with the world and present moment. “Life draws,” she once wrote, expressing how the events and objects around her defined her work.

In 1985 Asawa was diagnosed with lupus and for nearly a year her physical capacity was significantly reduced, but her creative spirit remained undiminished. In the last decades of her career, she concentrated her creative output on botanical drawings, some of which are gathered in this section. These intimate works, at times extremely realistic, at others abstract, often began with a gesture of generosity: gifts of plants from the artist’s friends and family, after whom many works are titled – such as Valentine Bouquet from Adam, 1991, referring to her son who often tended his parents’ flowering plants during their later years. Through the daily routine of recording the natural world around her, Asawa documented the extended community she shared it with, as well as the passage of time.

Noe Valley, 1960s-2000s

By 1960, Ruth Asawa, Albert Lanier, and their six children – Xavier, Aiko, Hudson, Adam, Addie, and Paul – had outgrown three San Francisco residences. Later that year she and Lanier purchased a large house in Noe Valley. The house from 1908 was designed by Walter Ratcliff and Alfred Jacobs in the spirit of Bernard Maybeck, the legendary professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who fuelled the region’s Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. The cedar-shingled exterior blended with its site, while a deck off the kitchen made for a fluid relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces.

Overall, the design of the house evoked a casual ease of living. Lanier spent a year renovating – including excavating to create a studio for Asawa and additional bedrooms – before the family moved in during the fall of 1961. Asawa designed monumental new front doors, on view in this section, and the family went on to build walkways from cobblestones scavenged from San Francisco beaches, planting beds for flowers, herbs, and vegetables that would prove to be an enduring source of inspiration for her drawings. Additionally, the artist created hundreds of unique face casts of family, friends, and colleagues between 1966 and 2000, some of which are on view here, resulting in a veritable index of the comings and goings at the Noe Valley house.

“My Home was and is My Studio”

Ruth Asawa’s famous quote, “My home was and is my studio,” encapsulates her philosophy of seamlessly integrating family life and artistic creation, where her San Francisco home became a living, breathing art space filled with family, projects, and her iconic hanging wire sculptures. Taking inspiration from this motif, this gallery brings together works in different mediums from across the arc of Asawa’s career, alongside works by her lifelong friends, and pays testament to her boundless practice.

The heart of the Asawa-Lanier Noe Valley house was its cathedral-like main living space, which boasted south-facing windows and a double-height ceiling measuring more than five meters tall. The space was filled with objects reflective of the constant creative activity the artist encouraged in her children and guests to the home. Its walls featured her own work along with art by friends including Josef Albers, among others. Its shelves displayed pots by Marguerite Wildenhain as well as art books. The most distinguishing feature of her living room was the spectacular array of Asawa’s wire sculptures suspended from the open overhead beams. Both within and outside her home and studio, Asawa never stopped working: She sketched and drew her surroundings, coiled or bundled wire in preparation for the next sculpture, folded paper for origami, and welcomed other artists, educators, and advocates for continued collaborations.

Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by exhibition curators Janet Bishop, Cara Manes, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, as well as a chronology by Dominika Tylcz, all shedding light on Ruth Asawa’s six-decade career, her unyielding search for new possibilities, and her unique artistic vocabulary.

Press release from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Holding a form-within-a-form sculpture
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo © 2026 Imogen Cunningham Trust / http://www.ImogenCunningham.com
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Nat Farbman (American born Poland, 1907-1988)
Artist Ruth Asawa making wire sculptures, California, United States
November 1954
Image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Nat Farbman immigrated to United States 1911, was a photographer for LIFE magazine from 1946 to 1961.

Nat Farbman (American born Poland, 1907-1988)
Portrait of Japanese American artist sculptor Ruth Asawa as she sketches a design
1954
Image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Ruth Asawa
1957
Photo © 2026 Imogen Cunningham Trust / http://www.ImogenCunningham.com
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Ruth Asawa in Her Dining Room with Tied-Wire Sculptures
1963
Gelatin silver print
Photo © 2026 Imogen Cunningham Trust / http://www.ImogenCunningham.com
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Joan Pearson Watkins (American, 1924-2013)
Ruth Asawa with her children Addie and Paul in front of Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Ruth Asawa’s Home), at her home in San Francisco
c. 1965
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Joan Pearson Watkins (also known as Joan Jockwig Pearson Watkins) was an American ceramist, museum curator, and photographer.

Joan Pearson Watkins’ archival photography serves as a vital historical record of the mid-20th century art scene, capturing intimate moments of iconic American artists in their creative spaces. Rather than staging rigid portraits, her camera documented the organic, daily environments where famous mid-century modernism was actively being built.

Her most famous body of photographic work documents the iconic Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa. Watkins captured crucial archival images of Asawa’s life and environment including photos showing how Asawa lived alongside her intricate, hanging looped-wire sculptures, serving as an invaluable visual record for modern museum retrospectives

Rondal Partridge (American, 1917-2015)
Living room of Ruth Asawa’s home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighbourhood
1969
Photo © 2026 Rondal Partridge Archives
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Rondal Partridge (September 4, 1917 – June 19, 2015) was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker. …

Career as a photographer

In 1940, he got a job with a New Deal agency called the National Youth Administration, documenting the problems faced by young people in the final years of the Great Depression.

In contrast to Adams, whose work focused on the beauty of the natural landscape, Partridge documented the human built infrastructure of Yosemite, as well as changes to the built environment of the San Francisco Bay Area. An example of such work is his mid 1960s photograph Pave It and Paint It Green. The photo shows iconic Yosemite peak Half Dome in the background, while the foreground consists of a parking lot filled with cars. In the photo, “the distinction between city and wilderness has disappeared”. Partridge also made a documentary film of the same name, which was shown on television. Adams, who did not appreciate irony or social commentary in photography, disapproved of Partridge’s 1960s work in Yosemite, although he later called Partridge a “fine photographer” in his autobiography.

Partridge has taken portraits of ordinary working people, as well as many notable people including Odetta, Ruth Asawa, Judy Dater, Peter Scott Lewis, John Carl Warnecke, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Diego Rivera as well as his mother, Imogen Cunningham.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Laurence Cuneo (American)
Ruth Asawa (second from left) with visitors to her exhibition Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA)
1973
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Laurence Cuneo (American)
Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.540, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form) hanging in front of the artist’s Wall of Masks (LC.012) on the exterior of her home in San Francisco
c. 1973
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

By 1960, Asawa, Albert Lanier, and their six children – Xavier, Aiko, Hudson, Adam, Addie, and Paul – had outgrown three San Francisco residences. Later that year she and Lanier purchased a large house in Noe Valley. Lanier spent a year renovating – including excavating to create a studio for Asawa and additional bedrooms – before the family moved in during the fall of 1961.

Asawa designed monumental new front doors, on view in this section and titled Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Ruth Asawa’s Home), 1961, which were featured prominently in her new home. She used a durable wood native to the West Coast and drew an allover pattern of interlocking waves that joined across the two doors when closed. Her older children also helped her to carve and finish the surface, using mallets and chisels to carve shallow, raised patterns across both sides of the doors, and smoothing the surface with a blowtorch and wire brushes. The family went on to build walkways from cobblestones scavenged from San Francisco beaches, planting beds for flowers, herbs, and vegetables that would prove to be an enduring source of inspiration for Asawa’s drawings.

Additionally, the artist created hundreds of unique face casts of family, friends, and colleagues between 1966 and 2000, some of which are on view in this section as well, resulting in a veritable index of the comings and goings at the Noe Valley house.

Laurence Cuneo (American)
Ruth Asawa and her granddaughter with Japanese American Internment Memorial (PC.011)
1990-1994
Commissioned by the City of San José; 300 South First Street, San José
© 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando,
48009 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 7pm

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website

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Exhibition: ‘Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan’ at Princeton University Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 19th April – 7th September, 2026

Curator: Brendan Fay

Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Hilltop view of red van and camera on tripod
1964
35 mm slide
© Trustees of Princeton University. Courtesy the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

It’s such a pity when a gallery or museum spends an inordinate amount of time, energy and money to put on an exhibition and then doesn’t do all it can to promote the exhibition by providing media and installation photographs.

As I observed to my friend Colin Vickery on the Art Blart Facebook page, I can’t really comment on the exhibition as there were so few media images and one installation photo that I really don’t have much to go on. I had to scrounge around just to get enough to make up this post

Of course each of the photographers I admire in their own right but together … that would be incredible to see. One can only imagine the energy bouncing between the images of three masters of photography.

Suffice to say I have ordered the catalogue even though it’s $110 in Australia on Amazon.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Princeton University Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Soon, the grand sweep of the exhibition becomes clear as it maps a shared strategy among this trio in the formation of a network of institutions, criticism, publishing, museum engagement, and, perhaps most crucially, an educational infrastructure that would embed photography as an academic and cultural participant. As a premise, it is both startling and self-evident and vividly demonstrates the coordination of parts among the Museum of Modern Art, Aperture, the George Eastman Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. Indeed, Photography as a Way of Life is as much about the careers of each photographer and their advancement as they chaperoned the medium. The exhibition does not seem a matter of cunning and opportunism, as it might be perceived, but of passion and commitment. …

To its credit, the exhibition includes a second chapter in the chronicle. By 1970, a new generation of photographers who had studied at RISD, Rochester Institute of Technology and the newly formed Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, in the spirit of the times, departed from the received wisdom of the photograph as a formalist device. From the tutelage of Callahan and Siskind, especially, came an assertion of the photograph not as an object of wistful contemplation but one of cultural rhetoric. It was not a delicate mimetic device but a public construction, a surface and a process. Graduates of this school of thought and practice became a pedagogical diaspora that propagated photographic thinking as we know it today.”

Stephen Frailey. “Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan,” on The Brooklyn Rail website July/August 2026 [Online] Cited 12/08/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) 'Eleanor' about 1947

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor
c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Harry Callahan and courtesy Pace Gallery

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Grasses in Snow
Detroit, 1943
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Harry Callahan and courtesy Pace Gallery

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor, Chicago
1952
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Harry Callahan. Courtesy Pace Gallery

Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Devil’s Slide, San Mateo County, California, October 12, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Trustees of Princeton University

Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Jan Davis, vicinity of Pescadero, California, June 30 1951
1951
Gelatin silver print
The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum, bequest of Minor White
© Trustees of Princeton University

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation 37
1953
Gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum
Gift of Robert A. Wayne, Class of 1960
© Aaron Siskind/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Photography as a Way of Life examines the careers of Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan – influential photographers, teachers, and thinkers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century – and traces their impact on the field of photography. Training and inspiring makers through courses, workshops, exhibitions, magazines, and photobooks, these artists built a devoted audience for their work while shaping the aspirations of their era.

Amid exploding markets for Kodak’s snapshots and Magnum’s decisive moments, White, Siskind, and Callahan shared inclinations toward abstraction and toward deeply personal photographs. Seeking to carve out a new role and status for art photography, just as a new crop of photography programs were emerging within higher education, they established themselves as icons among the first generation of college-level photography teachers.

Drawing on the rich photography holdings of the Princeton University Art Museum and its Minor White Archive, this exhibition brings together iconic and previously unpublished colour and black-and-white prints, rarely seen slides, and an array of published and archival materials that illuminate a vision of making a living and shaping a life through photography.

Text from the Princeton University Art Museum website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, 2026
Photo: Joseph Hu

“In bringing their works together in dialogue, [Brendan] Fay illustrates how White, Siskind, Callahan – each in his own way and as a spiritual collective – not only elevated photography into a way of making a comfortable living, but as a manifesto for how to be in the world. As fellow travelers, they would shape their medium into a discipline defined by an intentional and introspective way of seeing, that is, one that has a worldview, a morality. …

Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan shared a propensity for abstraction, which set their vision apart from the post–World War II years when documentary photography, Kodak’s snapshots, and Magnum’s “decisive moments” dominated the market. They were steadfast in their artistic right to ambiguity and improvisation. They rejected reproducibility, resisted interpretation. They carried on the Romantic tradition of superimposing one’s emotional landscape onto natural terrain. They saw the ethereal in urban settings. They associated themselves with the Beat poets and Abstract Expressionists. White, in particular, carved out a space for so-called creative photography as the founding editor of this magazine and championed the works of Callahan and Siskind in its pages. (White co-founded Aperture in 1952 and was one of the magazine’s longtime editors. His archives are held by the Princeton University Art Museum.)”

Michael Londres. “How Three Friends Turned Photography into a Way of Life,” on the Aperture website, July 31, 2026 [Online] Cited 13/08/2026

Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Layout mock-up for the first issue of Aperture
1952
Graphite drawings, text, and paper
Museum purchase, Minor White Archive Fund
© Trustees of Princeton University
Photo: Joseph Hu

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Martha’s Vineyard IIIB
1954
Gelatin silver print
© the artist and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The Princeton University Art Museum announces Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, an exhibition exploring the intertwined careers of three of the most influential photographers and teachers in mid-twentieth-century America. On view in Princeton from April 19 through September 7, 2026, and then traveling, the exhibition draws on the rich photography holdings of the Princeton University Art Museum and its Minor White Archive to bring together iconic and previously unpublished colour and black-and-white prints, rarely seen slides, and an array of published and archival materials that illuminate a vision of making a living and shaping a life through photography.

“Photography as a Way of Life highlights a pivotal historical moment when photography emerged as a serious academic discipline and a viable artistic profession, and thus as a way of being and living,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher-David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “White, Siskind, and Callahan did more than make extraordinary photographs: They built institutions, communities, and ideas that continue to shape how photography is taught and valued today.”

Tracing the decades after World War II, Photography as a Way of Life explores how Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan redefined photography as both an artistic practice and a professional vocation. Coming to the medium from distinct backgrounds and visual traditions, these three artists converged around shared commitments to abstraction, deeply personal expression, and the belief that photography could sustain a life’s work.

The exhibition takes its title from a recurring phrase in Minor White’s diaries and letters, in which he described photography as a “way of life.” For White, the phrase encompassed artistic ambition, pedagogy, and personal growth – a vision he advanced as a founding editor of Aperture, the influential photography magazine launched in 1952. Siskind and Callahan were central figures in White’s vision for the field, with their work prominently featured in Aperture alongside broader discussions of photographic education and postwar art photography.

“Princeton University holds a central place in the academic study of photography, with a proud legacy of stewardship and landmark scholarly exhibitions,” said Brendan Fay, exhibition curator. “The Minor White Archive is one of the cornerstones of that legacy, and it’s an honour to present an exhibition that builds on that strength during the new Museum’s inaugural year.”

From the 1940s through the 1970s, amid booming markets for Kodak snapshots and photojournalism, photography began to take root within higher education. White, Siskind, and Callahan were among the first generation of college-level photography teachers, developing models of photographic education during the GI Bill era that quickly spread across colleges and universities in the United States. While achieving critical success through books, exhibitions, and museum acquisitions, these artists also helped catalyze the creation of academic programs, publishing ventures, and professional societies that defined the postwar photographic landscape.

Highlights of the exhibition include a reconstruction of White’s Slow Dance, a projected sequence of color slides performed for live audiences in the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as materials from magazines and journals ranging from Popular Photography and Apertureto poetry publications and The Black Photographers Annual. The exhibition also traces the expansive networks shaped by these photographers, featuring works by more than forty additional artists, from Alfred Stieglitz and Dorothea Lange to Anthony Barboza and Donna-Lee Phillips.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue copublished by the Museum and Princeton University Press. While on view in Princeton, the exhibition will inspire a number of public programs, including a two-day symposium beginning April 30, a film series, and a talk by curator Brendan Fay on April 18. Attendees to the curatorial talk will have the opportunity to preview the exhibition alongside Museum members prior to the exhibition’s public opening the following day. Visit the exhibition website for a full list of related programming.

Photography as a Way of Life is curated by Brendan Fay, associate professor of art history in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University and is organized and presented by the Princeton University Art Museum. Following its debut at Princeton, the exhibition will travel through 2028, with presentations at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

Exhibition credits

Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan is made possible by leadership support from Jim McKinney and the late Valerie McKinney, with generous support from Anne Robinson Woods and Sandy and Robin Stuart.

Additional support is provided by Black Dog Private Foundation; the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; the Peter C. Bunnell Photography Fund; Princeton University’s Department of Art & Archaeology, Effron Center for the Study of America, and Humanities Council; Kathryn Richardson and family; and contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.

The accompanying publication is made possible in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund; the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University; Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Press release from Princeton University Art Museum

Ming Smith (American, b. 1951)
Oopdeedoo, Brooklyn, NY, from the series Coney Island
1976
Gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
© Ming Smith
Photo: Emile Askey

Donna-Lee Phillips (American, b. 1941)
Fragments from a Visual Journal
1977
Gelatin silver print
Black Dog Collection
© Hal Fischer

'Photography As A Way Of Life' book cover

Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan carved out a new role for photographers and their art in the decades after World War Two. Photography as a Way of Life traces how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium as a livelihood and a life’s work.

Together with growing markets for snapshots and photojournalism, the postwar years saw the emergence of photography as an established field of study in higher education. In this beautifully produced book, Brendan Fay takes readers from the late 1940s through the 1970s to explore how White, Siskind, and Callahan transformed the ways photography was taught, shown, and understood. Inclined toward abstraction and personally expressive images, they modeled a commitment to art in the face of commercial and professional pressures. In classrooms and private workshops and through exhibitions, photobooks, and magazines-including Aperture, with White as its founding editor-they offered training and inspiration while building a devoted audience for their pictures.

Blending stunning illustrations with rare archival material published here for the first time, Photography as a Way of Lifebrings together the work of three boldly inventive artists and educators who opened new possibilities for photography in postwar America and exemplified a vision of learning and living through photography.

Published in association with the Princeton University Art Museum

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Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ 08544-1018 USA

Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday 10am – 5pm
Thursday – Friday 10am – 8pm
Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 12 – 5pm

Princeton University Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

“While the photographs in this posting portray the cultures and communities associated with mining, the industries, towns and cities, the people and the landscapes what they don’t account for is the ongoing physical, psychological and emotional scars that the results of mining leave behind.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 23rd May – 23rd August, 2026

C0-curators: Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art and Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at Milwaukee Art Museum

Zig Jackson, Rising Buffalo (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) (b. 1957)
Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mine, Tooele, Utah
2004
Gelatin silver print
Image: 33.0 x 40.6cm (13 x 16 in.)
Sheet: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams
© Zig Jackson
Photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa

The rape of the earth

Mining helps improve our lives in so many ways and yet the harm it causes the planet, the severe environmental degradation, indigenous dispossession and systemic violence associated with resource extraction is undeniable.

The phrase “the rape of the earth” “characterises the literal carving up of the landscape. Large-scale operations – such as open-cut mining – strip topsoil, destroy ecosystems, pollute water tables, and leave irreversible physical scars on the terrain. Indigenous groups, such as the Sámi feminists against mining in Sábme, use the phrase to describe how mining fractures the sacred, interdependent web of connection between land, humans, and nonhuman lifeworlds.” (Google AI)

The interdependent web of connection between land, humans and nonhuman lifeworlds running beneath the surface, hidden from view, that life force of the world and the cosmos that is so violently ruptured in the mining process.

While the photographs in this posting portray the cultures and communities associated with mining, the industries, towns and cities, the people and the landscapes what they don’t account for is the ongoing physical, psychological and emotional scars that the results of mining leave behind. Scars that riddle the earth’s surface as much as they do the minds of the people that love this planet as a holistic entity. You only have to look at Zig Jackson, Rising Buffalo’s photograph Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mine, Tooele, Utah (2004, above) to understand what I mean.

When it’s all too late only then will we have realised what we have lost.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown photographer (American)
Portrait of a California gold miner with pick and shovel
c. 1855
Quarter-plate daguerreotype
Plate (quarter): 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in. (10.8 x 8.26cm)
Case (tray): 4 11/16 x 3 5/8 x 3/8 in. (11.91 x 9.22 x 0.97cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation

Environmental impacts of mining

The environmental impacts of mining are significant. Establishing mining sites requires an enormous amount of construction, which often causes deforestation and loss of wildlife habitats and biodiversity.

Surface mines, which require the use of explosives and heavy machinery to expose materials near the earth’s surface, cause massive canyon-sized holes in the land and lead to soil erosion and degradation around surrounding areas. Mountaintop removal mining, a method of coal mining, uses explosives to blast the entire top of a mountain.

Surface mines create a huge amount of waste materials. Mines release harmful substances into the air and water, and can cause serious health issues if inhaled or consumed. Mines also release acidic water, which can kill marine life and make freshwater unsuitable for drinking. Underground mining produces fewer waste materials than surface mines, but they are risky for mine workers.

The mining industry emits carbon via transportation and energy use, and produces fossil fuels – the largest source of carbon emissions in the world.

Even after mines are decommissioned, they continue to impact the environment. Acid mine drainage occurs after mines have been abandoned, and results in heavy metals entering water systems and harming the plants, animals and humans that consume it.

Social impacts of mining

Mining can create employment opportunities, boost economies and provide investment for local development projects. However, mining operations that don’t respect human rights or protect the environment can cause significant harm to surrounding communities.

Anonymous. “Resource wealth, poverty, and environmental impact in mining,” on the Oxfam Australia website, 1 July 2025 [Online] Cited 18/08/2026

American 19th Century
Shipping Oil – Story Farm
1860s-1870s
Stereoscopic albumen silver print
Image/sheet: 7.94 × 14.92cm (3 1/8 × 5 7/8 in.)
Mount: 8.73 × 17.46cm (3 7/16 × 6 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Public domain

James F. Ryder (American, 1826-1904)
Atlantic & Great Western Railway
1862
Albumen print
Image/sheet: 18.8 x 23.7cm (7 3/8 x 9 5/16 in.)
Mount: 25.3 x 32.4cm (9 15/16 x 12 3/4 in.)
Mat: 14 x 18 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Thomas H. Johnson (American, b. 1821 – d. ?)
Gibson’s Breaker, Rushdale, Del. & Hudson Canal Co.,
c. 1863-1865
Albumen print
Image/sheet: 30.7 x 41cm (12 1/16 x 16 1/8 in.)
Mount: 44.3 x 53cm (17 7/16 x 20 7/8 in.)
Mat: 20 x 26 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Thomas H. Johnson (American, b. 1821 - d. ?) 'Birdsey Breaker, Rushdale, Del. & Hudson Canal Co.,' 1863-1865

Thomas H. Johnson (American, b. 1821 – d. ?)
Birdsey Breaker, Archbald, Del. & Hudson Canal Co.,
1863-1865
Albumen print
Image/sheet: 30.6 x 40.8cm (12 1/16 x 16 1/16 in.)
Mount: 45.4 x 55.6cm (17 7/8 x 21 7/8 in.)
Mat: 20 x 26 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902)
Valley of Bitter Creek from Coal Mine
1867-1869
Albumen silver print
22.86 x 29.53cm (9 x 11 5/8 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Union Pacific Railroad Company

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882)
Savage Mine, Curtis Shaft, Virginia City, Nevada
1868
albumen silver print
Image: 14.45 x 19.53cm (5 11/16 x 7 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 19.53 x 26.83cm (7 11/16 x 10 9/16 in.)
Mount: 31.75 x 37.78cm (12 1/2 x 14 7/8 in.)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Timothy O’Sullivan photographed men preparing to descend 900 feet into the mine.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) 'Comstock Mine, Virginia City, Nevada 1868 Comstock Mine, Virginia City, Nevada' 1868

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882)
Comstock Mine, Virginia City, Nevada
1868
Albumen print
Image: 18.89 x 13.49cm (7 7/16 x 5 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 18.26 x 26.99cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Mount: 31.59 x 37.31cm (12 7/16 x 14 11/16 in.)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

O’Sullivan used a magnesium flash to illuminate a miner wielding an axe underground.

Thomas Houseworth (American, 1828-1916)
Hydraulic Mining – Behind the Pipes, in the Kennebunk Claim, Birchville, Nevada County
c. 1868-1869
Stereoscopic albumen prints
Image: 7.9 x 20.6cm (3 1/8 x 8 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 8.9 x 17.5cm (3 1/2 x 6 7/8 in.)
Wikipedia Commons Public domain

B.F. Childs (American, 1841-1921)
New York, Iron Mine [Michigan]
c. 1871-1876
Stereoscopic albumen print
Image: 7.9 x 15.9cm (3 1/8 x 6 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 8.7 x 17.5cm (3 7/16 x 6 7/8 in.)
Collection of Leonard A. Walle

Brainard F. Childs photographed a man outside an iron mine in Michigan. He’s dwarfed by its dark and cavernous entrance.

Brainard Fermont Childs (1841-1921) was an American 19th-century photographer best known for his studio portraits and stereoviews documenting the Great Lakes region, particularly Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Operating the Child’s Art Gallery in Marquette, Michigan, he captured extensive regional landscapes, scenes of early mining and shipping on Lake Superior, and local Ojibwe life. Today, many of his surviving albumen prints and glass-plate negatives are preserved in historical collections, including the British Museum.

Google AI

B.F. Childs (American, 1841-1921)
Down the Franklin Tramroad
c. 1867-1868
Stereoscopic albumen prints
Image: 7.5 x 16.2cm (2 15/16 x 6 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 8.3 x 17.2cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
Collection of Leonard A. Walle

Dependent on precious metals from its inception, photography has always been intertwined with the natural resources that are fundamental to modern industrialised life. Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography is the first exhibition to exclusively examine how photographers from the mid-19th century to today have powerfully captured the effects of resource extraction on the land and communities of the United States. Featuring some 150 photographs that span 185 years, this exhibition focuses especially on the subterranean removal of the minerals and fossil fuels that power this country’s economy and industry. Together, these works demonstrate how photographers have drawn on changing technology and unique visual strategies to rise to the challenge of picturing these colossal industries.

Made for a variety of purposes, ranging from commercial boosterism and celebration of technical advancement to social documentation and community activism, the pictures in the exhibition shed light on how photography has revealed the costs of extraction and who benefits from its success. Divided into six broad, chronological sections that contextualise the complex history of photography and extraction, from daguerreotypes of the Gold Rush to large-scale, immersive photographs made in the last decade, Beneath the Surface highlights how artists have used photography to explore the relationship between extraction, society, and the environment.

This exhibition is curated by Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Malakoff Diggins, North Bloomfield, Nevada County [California]
1871
Albumen print
Image: 41.59 x 54.61cm (16 3/8 x 21 1/2 in.)
Mount: 55.88 x 71.12cm (22 x 28 in.)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

F. Jay Haynes (American, 1853-1921)
Granite Silver Mine, Montana
c. 1880
Albumen print
Image: 42.7 x 54.5cm (16 13/16 x 21 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 43 x 54.9cm (16 15/16 x 21 5/8 in.)
Mat: 22 x 28 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the UBS Art Collection
Public domain

Originally a studio photographer from the North Dakota Territory, Haynes spent most of his career documenting in pictures the development of the western territories. Commissioned in 1876 to make views along the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad, he traveled through the West until 1905, working in a railroad car equipped as both gallery and darkroom. Besides photographing spectacular views of natural scenery, Haynes produced an extensive record of the modification of the landscape by raliroad and industry.

On an 1881 trip to the newly created Yellowstone Park, via the new line of his railroad company employer, Haynes decided to pursue a commercial concession as park photographer. In 1884 he opened a studio and photography gallery in Yellowstone, selling to tourists prints of the park’s natural wonders, such as the Lone Star Geyser Cone. For more than thirty years Haynes served as the official photographer of Yellowstone National Park.

Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996) on the Smithsonian American Art Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 21/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

West & Waddell (American, Bradford, Pennsylvania, active 1880s)
Flowing Well
1880s
Stereoscopic albumen silver prints
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Public domain

Photographs of oil derricks document the rush that followed the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859.

William H. Rau (American, 1855-1920)
South Plainfield Coal Storage, capacity 100,000 tons
c. 1890
Albumen print
Image: 43.5 x 52.1cm (17 1/8 x 20 1/2 in.)
Collection of Paul Sack

Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940)
“A lonely job.” Willie Bryden, a nipper, 13 yrs old, Pittston, Pa.,
1911
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11.43 x 13.49cm (4 1/2 x 5 5/16 in.)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Gift of Robert Mann

Frank J. Schlueter (American, 1874-1972)
Goose Creek, Tex. oil field
1917
Gelatin silver print, panorama
Sheet: 19.6 x 150.3cm (7 11/16 x 59 3/16 in.)
Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Public domain

Schlueter photographed the quickly growing Houston region in the first half of the twentieth century, retiring in 1964. Schlueter’s work was used by early oil producers in the region to document and promote their work

The National Gallery of Art presents Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, the first exhibition to exclusively examine the relationship between resource extraction and American photography throughout its history. Spanning nearly 200 years, the exhibition examines how photographers have approached the challenge of capturing the significant but often hidden processes and impacts of the extraction of minerals, coal, and fossil fuels and its associated industries.

Featuring 150 photographs by more than 100 artists, including Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dorothea Lange, David Maisel, Gordon Parks, Mitch Epstein, Carleton Watkins, Will Wilson, and more, Beneath the Surface reveals how generations of photographers have utilised evolving technologies and distinctive visual strategies to document the industries that power and shape modern life. Beneath the Surface will be on view at the National Gallery of Art from May 23 to August 23, 2026, before travelling to the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

“As a defining visual medium of our modern age, photography is an essential tool to capture and communicate our shared history,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Beneath the Surface brings together a dynamic range of works to shed light on the medium’s intersections with a shaping force in American history and industry.”

The featured works, many of which are drawn from the National Gallery’s significant photography collection, span early daguerreotypes from the time of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s to pictures of rapid industrialisation in the 20th century and contemporary photographs produced at an immense scale. This expansive selection traces the layered history of extraction and how artists have used photography as a lens through which to communicate the industry’s relationship with society and the natural world.

“Photography itself is dependent on precious metals for its very existence, from the light sensitivity of silver in early processes to the copper of contemporary digital-camera batteries. At the same time, it has been the principal visual medium employed to depict extractive industries, evolving alongside the expansion of mining on an industrial scale since the 19th century,” said Diane Waggoner, co-curator of the exhibition and curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Beneath the Surface unites photographs made for a variety of purposes, from explicitly promotional and commercial uses to documentation efforts and socially engaged activism, shedding light on both the rewards and costs of resource extraction.”

The exhibition orients visitors with an introductory gallery displaying contemporary work, foregrounding themes relevant to the current moment and providing a critical framework for understanding the six broad, chronological sections that follow. Viewers will encounter works not only by historical photographers recognised for their work in capturing mining, drilling, and industrial subjects, such as Carleton Watkins, Margaret Bourke-White, Marion Post Wolcott, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, but also by less expected practitioners Florence Kemmler, Alma Lavenson, and Mary Morris. The exhibition includes works by contemporary photographers Edward Burtynsky, Binh Danh, Terry Evans, Victoria Sambunaris, and Cara Romero, among others.

“For almost two centuries photographers have played a central role in public understanding of resource extraction, drawing on a succession of technologies and strategies to capture activities that enable modern life but resist portrayal,” said Kristen Gaylord, co-curator of the exhibition and Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at Milwaukee Art Museum. “This exhibition demonstrates how, time and again, photographers have creatively pushed against the medium’s boundaries in a quest to impart the enormity of the country’s extractive activities and their effects.”

Beneath the Surface centres on the challenges artists face in capturing the colossal scale of extraction and its far-reaching impacts on communities and the environment. It also reveals the inventive strategies they have employed to depict this subject. The works on view reflect the full breadth of the medium, spanning landscapes, portraits of workers and panoramas of affected communities, photobooks, aerial imagery, analog and digital collage, camera-less photography, historical processes, narrative and performance work, and pictures that otherwise harness photography to communicate the scope of these industries.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Florence Kemmler (American, 1900-1972)
Oil Drums
c. 1929
Chlorobromide print
Image: 26.67 x 34.61cm (10 1/2 x 13 5/8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 22 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

The husband-and-wife team of Roland E. Schneider (1884-1934), and Florence B. Kemmler (1900-1972), were internationally exhibited salon photographers whose beautifully rendered works straddle both Pictorialist and modernist sensibilities. The San Diego couple worked together using the same 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex cameras and identical printing and mounting techniques. Nearly all their photographs were contact printed on warm, brownish black-toned chlorobromide papers.

Text from the Joseph Bellow Gallery website

Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989)
Tanks, Standard Oil Company
1931
Gelatin silver print
Sheet (trimmed to image): 24 x 18.4cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Fund for Photography

In 1930 she was introduced to Adams, Cunningham and Weston by art collector Albert Bender. Bender also wrote Lavenson a letter of introduction to give to Edward Weston. Two years later she was invited to participate in the famous Group f/64 show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, although there is some uncertainty about whether she should actually be called a “member” of Group f/64, given her association with Pictorialism. The announcement for the show at the de Young Museum listed seven photographers in Group f/64 and said “From time to time various other photographers will be asked to display their work with Group f/64. Those invited for the first showing are: Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Brett Weston.” However, in 1934 the group posted a notice in Camera Craft magazine that said “The F:64 group includes in its membership such well known names as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Imogene [sic] Cunningham, Consuela [sic] Kanaga and several others.” Lavenson was not mentioned by name in that notice, but her name is always listed as being associated with the group because of her place in the first exhibition. She was included in an exhibition of photography “by members and associates of Group f.64” held at Gallery 210, Lucas Hall, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Apr. 3-30, 1978.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
1936
Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard
Sheet (trimmed to image): 19 x 23.8cm (7 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.)
Support: 45.7 x 37.6cm (18 x 14 13/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 20 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mary and David Robinson

In 1936, Walker Evans captured several iconic photographs in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, during his landmark documentary work for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. His lens famously depicted the stark juxtapositions of the city’s industrial boom, highlighting steel mills looming over residential neighbourhoods and graveyards, as well as scenes of local auto graveyards.

Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985)
Copper Pit, Ruth, Nevada
1940
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.13 x 18.73cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.)
Black Dog Collection

Born in New York City in 1915, Arthur Rothstein showed an early interest in photography. While studying at Columbia University, he met economics instructor Roy Stryker, who would later establish the photographic section of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) in Washington, DC. Appreciating Rothstein’s technical proficiency and enthusiasm for photography, Stryker hired him in 1935 as the first staff photographer for the FSA. Praised for the directness and immediacy of his imagery, Rothstein produced notable photographic series on farming communities in the Midwestern Dust Bowl. After leaving the FSA in 1940, Rothstein took a position as photographer for Look magazine; he remained there until 1971, ultimately serving as the magazine’s director of photography.

Text from the International Center of Photography website

Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986)
Butte, Montana. Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Train of fifty-ton cars of copper ore leaving mines at Butte for smelter at Anaconda Montana
1942
Gelatin silver print
Mount: 29.21 x 24.29cm (11 1/2 x 9 9/16 in.)
Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Public domain

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Crude oil, fuel oil, gas oil, range oil and gasoline pipelines leading from the waterfront to the Everett Refinery. Everett, Massachusetts, May 1944
c. 1944
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 35.9 x 27.8cm (14 1/8 x 10 15/16 in.)
Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Courtesy of Exxon Mobil Corporation

Fons Ianelli (American, 1917-1988)
Jim Faye returning from the mines, Harlan County, Appalachia
1946
Gelatin silver print
Black Dog Collection
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
© Fons Ianelli

Andreas Feininger (American, 1906-1999)
Oil Derricks on Signal Hall, California
1948
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.32 x 25.08cm (8 x 9 7/8 in.)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of the Feininger Family
© Estate of Andreas Feininger

Arthur Grace (American, b. 1947)
Coal Miners’ Strike, Kelley’s Creek Hollow, West Virginia
December 1977
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Grace

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Doris McKinney, Republic Steel
1978-1979
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.3 x 17cm (7 3/16 x 6 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.3 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.)
Mat: 14 x 16 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Pierre Cremieux and Denise Jarvinen
© 2025, the Estate of Milton Rogovin

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Doris McKinney with Her Two Sons, Republic Steel
1987
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.1 x 17.7cm (7 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.2 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.)
Mat: 14 x 16 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Pierre Cremieux and Denise Jarvinen

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Tom Stroud, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, 6/12/80
1980
Gelatin silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Mining Exploration near Carson City, Nevada
1988
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.5 x 25cm (9 5/8 x 9 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 27.7 x 35.5cm (10 7/8 x 14 in.)
Mat: 16 x 18 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Jane P. Watkins

Photographing American Mining and Energy

Elizabeth Fortune

For nearly two centuries, American photography and the mining of valuable natural resources have been deeply intertwined.

Introduced in 1839, photography premiered less than a decade before successive metal mining booms transformed the landscape and demographics of the American West. Emerging extractive industries hired photographers to promote their operations and attract investors and workers.

Since photography’s inception, artists have used a range of techniques and formats to depict resource extraction like coal mining and oil drilling, which often occurs in remote locations, sometimes underground. Their aims and attitudes range from enthusiastic boosterism to impassioned critique. Together, these photographers’ works unearth and make visible the history of industrial mining and its continued impact on our everyday lives and the American landscape.

Daguerreotypes

After the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California, hundreds of thousands of aspiring miners flocked to the West Coast. Posed with tools of his trade, this miner was one of many who sat for a daguerreotype to memorialise their quest for precious metals.

The mining of silver, copper, and mercury was essential for the creation of daguerreotypes: the process produces a unique image on a highly polished silver-coated copper plate.

Stereographs

Photographers took advantage of the stereograph to make immersive scenes of resource extraction. A popular photographic format from the mid-1850s to the early 1900s, the stereograph features two pictures of the same subject taken about 2 1/2 inches apart, roughly the distance between our eyes. When seen through a stereoscope viewer, the two pictures appear to combine into a three-dimensional image (the equivalent of early 3D glasses).

Photographers were dispatched across the country and American territories to document places of interest. Sites of resource extraction were a particular draw. The discovery and mining of oil, gold, silver, and other materials excited many with the promise of prosperity and beckoned fortune seekers to these burgeoning industries.

Commissions and Surveys

Mining companies, as well as related businesses like railroads, commissioned early photographers to document industrial infrastructure as a way to mark technological advancements and to attract investors.

The Delaware and Hudson Railroad and Canal Company hired Thomas H. Johnson to photograph the expansion of their coal mining operations in northeastern Pennsylvania These “breakers” broke coal into fragments and sorted them by size.

Government-sponsored surveys presented other opportunities for nineteenth-century photographers to travel across the country and document mining sites. While on a geological survey in 1868, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed silver mining at the Comstock Lode in Nevada. There, he produced some of the first subterranean photographs.

Panoramas

The enormous scale demanded by resource extraction calls for a grand mode of representation. The panorama, derived from the Greek words for “complete” and “view,” is an ideal format. Its size and breadth can accommodate the vastness of industrial enterprises.

Frank Schlueter’s 1917 panoramic photograph, taken at Goose Creek, Texas, captures men and horses working alongside huge oil derricks, some so tall they extend beyond the picture frame. In 1901, oil was discovered at Spindletop along the Gulf Coast of Texas, which ushered in the modern petroleum industry and the Texas oil boom. Seeking business as a photographer, Schlueter opened a nearby studio and began accepting commissions for pictures of oil fields.

A century later, Indigenous photographer Lewis deSoto (Cahuilla) used the panoramic format to show power generation in California. Here, a picturesque coastline is dotted with palm trees and people enjoying the sunny Southern California day. In the distance rises the Encina Power Station, which permanently closed in 2018. The panorama’s wide vista reveals the looming presence of industry in even the most scenic of places.

The title refers to Carlsbad, the current name of the city where the beach is located, and Payómkawichum, the name Native Americans of the area call themselves. deSoto invokes the Indigenous name to link industrial power generation with the ancestral power imbued in the land.

Modernist Forms

Modernist photographers, with their interest in abstract shapes and daring camera angles, found a fitting subject in the sharp geometric forms of industrial facilities and machinery.

In the late 1920s, Margaret Bourke-White spent several months photographing inside the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland, Ohio. She called the evenings spent at the factory “a photographic paradise.” Bourke-White’s picture of glowing molten metal celebrates what she deemed the “beauty waiting to be discovered” at the plant.

In 1944, Gordon Parks joined a group of photographers hired by Standard Oil New Jersey to promote the company’s role in supporting the war effort. In Parks’s dynamic composition, orderly rows of cylindrical pipes converge at the horizon line, carrying oil to the Everett Finery in Massachusetts. Plumes of white steam hover over the refinery, suggesting a constant churn of manpower and machinery.

Aerial Views

Adopting a bird’s-eye view has allowed photographers to record the extent of resource extraction and the way it has marked our landscape. Photographers can also bypass access restrictions to industrial sites by flying overhead with a plane or drone. From the sky, a paradox emerges: although we can see more from a distance, the elevation skews scale and at times heightens the aesthetic appeal of earthbound places.

Taken from a helicopter, Emmet Gowin’s picture of a mining exploration near Carson City, Nevada, reveals an elaborate pattern of topographical scars. Gowin acknowledged the distorting effect of viewing industrial sites from the sky, remarking, “From the air it seemed like everything I was seeing was miraculous.”

Photographer Will Wilson (Diné) used a drone to capture this aerial view of pearl and copper hued remediation ponds that hold residual waste from uranium mining. Located in northwest New Mexico on the lands of the Navajo Nation, Church Rock Mill is the site of the largest radioactive spill in American history. The radioactive waste poses risks to nearby communities and ecosystems. By surveilling the remediation ponds from above, Wilson calls attention to these hazardous sites.

Portraits

Pictures of laborers in extractive industries spotlight those who power our nation. Sometimes operating in high-risk environments, these workers feed important supply chains. Portrait photographers foreground the humanity of their subjects and individualise the massive workforce supporting our industrial economy.

From 1979 to 1985, Richard Avedon traveled across 17 American states to photograph working-class Americans for his portrait project In the American West. Coal miners and oil field workers were among his most frequent subjects. Avedon is known for his portraits of celebrities and politicians, but here he elevates each worker to a vaunted status.

Tom Stroud, an oil field worker from Velma, Oklahoma, stands before Avedon’s signature white backdrop and looks directly at the camera. His skin, clothing, and helmet are splotched with mud and oil (Avedon preferred to photograph subjects at the end of their shifts). The portrait’s large size – about five feet tall by four feet wide – gives monumental status to Stroud and his labor.

Large-Scale Color Photographs

At first glance, the tidy yards, pristine garden shed, and welcoming patio furniture form an idyllic suburban scene. But in the distance, massive smokestacks and a cooling tower overtake the hazy gray sky.

Mitch Epstein’s mammoth picture records the looming presence of the Amos Coal Power Plant in Raymond City, West Virginia. The exceptional size (62 x 80 inches) of Epstein’s composition places us within a serene neighbourhood dominated by the coal industry. Its monumental scale confronts us with the immensity of extractive operations and the impact these industries have on the lands and people of the United States.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

In the Library: Photobooks and American Energy

This presentation draws from the National Gallery of Art Library collections. It looks at how artists use photobooks to reveal the impact of the energy industry on the American landscape and people.

In conjunction with Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, the National Gallery of Art Library presents an installation of 25 books and 2 zines examining how photographers use photobooks to document the impact of energy extraction, production, and circulation on the American landscape and its communities.

The books and zines on view illustrate complex narratives about how America is powered today, revealing the visual strategies and design decisions contemporary photographers use to contextualise and share their work. In the library reading room adjacent to the exhibition area, additional photobooks are available for visitors to browse.

Books offer a different experience than seeing images on a wall or your social media feed. Complex stories are told when photos join text, other printed elements, and even the book binding. Come explore a wide-ranging selection of photobooks by contemporary photographers – then handle more examples in our reading room.

Curated by Yuri Long, special collections librarian at the National Gallery, this installation is on view from May 25 through August 21, 2026, in the East Building Library Atrium from 11.00 am to 4.30 pm, Monday through Friday, except federal holidays.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004
2004, printed 2025
Inkjet print
Image/sheet: 157.48 x 203.2cm (62 x 80 in.)
Framed: 160.02 x 207.01 x 6.35cm (63 x 81 1/2 x 2 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the artist
© Mitch Epstein

Victoria Sambunaris (American, b. 1964)
Untitled (Coaldale, Pennsylvania)
2007
Chromogenic print
Overall: 99.06 x 139.7cm (39 x 55 in.)
Mat: 41 x 57 in. (approx.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Lannan Foundation
© Victoria Sambunaris and Yancey Richardson Gallery

David Maisel (American, b. 1961)
American Mine, Carlin, Nevada 1
2007, printed 2024
Inkjet print
Collection of Amy and Tony D’Orazio
© David Maisel. All rights reserved

LaToya Ruby Frazier (American, b. 1982)
U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works & Monongahela
2013
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 121.29 x 151.77cm (47 3/4 x 59 3/4 in.)
Framed: 123.83 x 154.31 x 4.45cm (48 3/4 x 60 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© LaToya Ruby Frazier

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, b. 1977)
Oil Boom
2015, printed 2023
From the series Water Memories
inkjet print
Image: 101.6 x 100.33cm (40 x 39 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 111.76 x 110.49cm (44 x 43 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Renée Harbers Liddell
© Cara Romero. All rights reserved

Andrew Borowiec (American, b. 1956)
Blast Furnace, Cleveland
2016
Inkjet print
Image: 67.95 x 101.6cm (26 3/4 x 40 in.)
Sheet: 80.01 x 111.76cm (31 1/2 x 44 in.)
Mat: 32 3/4 x 46 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund

Will Wilson (Diné) (b. 1969)
Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation, 36. 769690596277414 N / -108. 68547605691704 W
2020
Inkjet print
Image: 60.96 x 121.92cm (24 x 48 in.)
Sheet: 94.62 x 109.22cm (37 1/4 x 43 in.)
Back mat: 35 15/16 x 43 1/2 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel
Courtesy of the artist and www.dineconnect.org

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Photographs: Aaron Siskind ‘Harlem Photographs’ 1932-1940

“This is where I think that Siskind was less than happy with the results of his documentary photographs – that they weren’t giving him what he wanted out of his art: that interface of the image and imagination.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

July 2026

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Boys in Empty Tenement
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print

Image and imagination

I always find it fascinating to view the first few years of an artist’s journey, the golden path they take, for it more than likely informs all that is to come.

In the greatest abstract expressionist photographer the world has known, Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991), his starting point was as a straight documentary photographer, a member of the New York Photo League, a “left-leaning documentary collective, which prioritised using photography to advocate for social change.”

Using a large format camera and tripod Siskind, for his photo project Harlem Document, captured “the vibrancy, harsh realities, and daily life of the Black community in Harlem” – images which had their roots in American social documentary photography of the period and photographers such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) government program (1935-1944) which documented the struggles of rural Americans during the Great Depression.

As I have written in a 2023 text titled “Transcending reality”, “To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream … but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself”.”

This is where I think that Siskind was less than happy with the results of his documentary photographs – that they weren’t giving him what he wanted out of his art: that interface of the image and imagination.

“In working from the documentary approach, I had always tried to find what kind of meaning you could get in a picture of that kind, and was beginning to feel that I was not getting it. I felt I wasn’t getting anything really personal, really powerful and special…. My documentary pictures were very quiet and very formal.”1

Moving into the 1940s Siskind began experimenting with more abstract compositions (with their link to Abstract Expressionist painting). Evidence of this reorientation in his image making can already be seen in some of the documentary photographs in this posting. For example, the photographs Facades (1938, below) and Harlem (1938, below) both propose the flattening of the photographic surface with an interest in the geometry and abstraction of form – circle, oblong, square, diagonal, curve, line – within the pictorial plane, but with an attendant emphasis on light, texture and tone.

“Though he did not create the lines, shapes, rhythms and patterns in his images, he nonetheless expressed the lyricism of their relationships by harmoniously arriving at the perfect composition. And though his abstract photographs possessed undeniable content, he subverted that content by offering new interpretive possibilities based on the feelings the images conveyed.”2

Image and imagination.

Thus, Siskind was intelligent enough, was aware and informed enough, of his feelings towards the world and the cultural developments around him to approach a crossroads in his development as an artist, to recognise, that is the key word, to recognise the path he needed, he wanted to take.

And so we are forever grateful to have his abstract expressionist photographs that his spirit guided him towards, photographs that may also light our own path.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. I have added relevant information on Siskind’s art practice, theatres, and ballrooms where possible and I have also included an extract from Gordon Parks’ forward to Siskind’s book Harlem Document.

1/ Jaromir Stephany unpublished interview with Aaron Siskind, February 1963. This interview is in the private papers of Jaormir Stephany quoted in Marcia Battle. “Harlem: A Document,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, pp. 4-6

2/ Phillip Barcio. “How Aaron Siskind Found Abstraction On The Streets,” on the Ideelart website, Feb 15, 2017 [Online] Cited 17/07/2026

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Photography has tremendous social value. Upon the photographer rests the responsibility and duty of recording a true image of the world as it is today. Moreover, he must not only show us how we live, but indicate the logical development of our lives.”

Photo Notes, newsletter of the Photo League, August 1938

Aaron Siskind’s photographs from 1935-1940 form the core of the Harlem Document, a landmark sociological and visual study commissioned by the New York Photo League. Siskind headed the Feature Group of this radical, left-leaning documentary collective, which prioritised using photography to advocate for social change. The images capture the vibrancy, harsh realities, and daily life of the Black community in Harlem during the Great Depression.

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Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Kitchen Scene
1937
Gelatin silver print

From 1937 to 1944, Siskind took pictures in and around Harlem – of its businesses, domestic interiors, religious and social organisations, and nightlife. He did so as a member of the New York Photo League – a documentary photography collective with roots in radical leftist politics – and in collaboration with journalist and sociologist Michael Carter and other photographers as part of a cultural study of Harlem. In 1981 fifty-two of Siskind’s images were published in the book Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940 alongside first-person interviews conducted in the late 1930s by writers employed by the Federal Writers Project, including novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

MoMA Gallery label from 2024

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) 'Apollo Theatre' 1937

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Apollo Theater
1937
Gelatin silver print

Apollo Theater

Since opening its doors in 1914 and introducing the first Amateur Night contests in 1934, The Apollo has played a major role in the emergence of jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, gospel, blues, and soul – all quintessentially American music genres. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr., James Brown, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, and countless others began their road to stardom on the Apollo stage. Today, The Apollo is a respected nonprofit presenting concerts, theatrical and dance performances, film screenings, educational programs, and community outreach programs.

The neoclassical theater known today as The Apollo’s Historic Theater was designed by George Keister and first owned by Sidney Cohen. In 1914, Benjamin Hurtig and Harry Seamon obtained a thirty-year lease on the newly constructed theater, calling it Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater. Like many American theaters during this time, African-Americans were not allowed to attend as patrons or to perform.

In 1933, Fiorello La Guardia, who would later become New York City’s Mayor, began a campaign against burlesque, and Hurtig & Seamon’s was one of many theaters that would close down. Cohen reopened the building as the 125th Street Apollo Theatre in 1934 with his partner, Morris Sussman, serving as manager. Cohen and Sussman changed the format of the shows from burlesque to variety revues and redirected their marketing attention to the growing African-American community in Harlem.

Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher took over The Apollo in 1935. The Schiffman and Brecher families would operate the Theater until the late 1970s. The Apollo reopened briefly in 1978 under new management then closed again in November 1979. In 1981, it was purchased by Percy Sutton, a prominent lawyer, politician, media and technology executive, and a group of private investors. Under Sutton’s ownership, the Theater was equipped with a recording and television studio.

Text from the Apollo Theater website. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Lady In Kitchen
1937
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind’s artistic trajectory parallels broader shifts within mid-20th-century American photography. In the 1930s he cut his teeth as a documentary photographer affiliated with the Workers Film and Photo League, an artists’ cooperative that strove to advance progressive political causes. The following decade saw him turn away from studies of society. For the remainder of his career, he created still lifes that aimed to articulate interior states through near-abstract visual fields. Of this dramatic shift in his practice, the artist said, “For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive.”1

Siskind’s documentary work was carefully planned and researched in advance. He honed this approach at the Film and Photo League, which he joined in 1933, only three years after receiving his first camera as a honeymoon gift. Among this community of photographers and filmmakers – many of them, like Siskind, the New York-born children of Jewish immigrants – he found technical guidance and critical feedback. When the League’s photographers broke from its filmmakers to establish the standalone Photo League in 1936, Siskind helped form its Feature Group, a unit dedicated to creating photo essays like those appearing in LIFE magazine and being produced by the Farm Security Administration. Collaborative at its core, the Feature Group prioritised the free exchange of ideas: each project began with a discussion of how to approach photographing its subject and ended with the group assessing their effort collectively. “We discovered a relationship between the clarity of one’s thought and feeling and the clarity of picture-making,” Siskind recalled of these formative dialogues.2

Of the many projects the Feature Group completed during Siskind’s four years of leadership, its most extended and ambitious was Harlem Document. This expansive cultural study of Harlem, undertaken between 1937 and 1940 in close consultation with the sociologist Michael Carter, originally aimed to produce a photographically illustrated book authored by Carter. Although the publication never materialised, Siskind’s photographs for Harlem Document indicate the project’s ambitious scope, depicting street life, domestic interiors, and gathering spots ranging from churches to dance halls to theaters.

Samuel Allen, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, 2025 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 14/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

1/ Aaron Siskind, “The Drama of Objects,” Minicam Photography 8, no. 9 (June 1945), 23.

2/ Aaron Siskind, “The Feature Group,” Photo Notes (June-July 1940), 7.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Lafayette Theatre
1937
Gelatin silver print

Lafayette Theatre

The Lafayette Theatre (1912–1951), known locally as “the House Beautiful”, was one of the most famous theaters in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was an entertainment venue located at 132nd Street and 7th Avenue. The first major theatre in New York to desegregate, in its early history the theatre was home to the African American repertory theatre company the Lafayette Players. This group was originally founded by Anita Bush as Anita Bush Stock Company in 1914 and became a part of the Lafayette Theatre in 1916 when the theatre bought the stock company. The Lafayette Players was a successful company from the 1910s through the 1930s; after which the company floundered. In 1951 the theatre closed and was sold to the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The structure was demolished in 2013.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Night Club I
1937
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Peace Meals
1937
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind’s Harlem document, a mirror of my own past, speaks explicitly for itself. It is an ongoing memory of black people living in crowded kitchenettes; suffering the loneliness of rented bedrooms; prating in leftover churches, and grasping a patch of happiness whenever and wherever they could find it. It is a nostalgic look at a kind of past that threatens to hang around Harlem for a long time to come – to doom it to further frustration and unrest. Those same tenements that once imprisoned me are still there, refusing to crumble, holding other restless black boys for sentence without trial.

I remember swarms of slow-moving people, moving close together up on Lenox Avenue – past child shacks, rib joints, funeral parlours and storefront churches- knowing one another but seldom bothering to speak. A city of blackness crammed inside a white city where, when you walked our the door, you became a stranger. …

Harlem has meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For me, in those days, it meant hunger, cultural devastation, unrequited longing and disillusionment. To others it was the swinging, exciting capitol of the entire Black world, the exotic Mecca of melting music, good times and dancing feet. Yet, for some, it was a sanctuary where loftier dreams were fostered; where now and then some of those dreams were realised, but where mostly they were hopelessly spent. To just about everyone who has worked in the vital processes of its survival, whose life has been textured by its tradition, Harlem is a place that won’t give up. Wobbly now under the impact of the past decades, its history mirror those problems its mother country once endured.

Extract from Gordon Parks. “Foreword,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Street Scene
1937
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Wishing Tree
1937
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Church Interior
1938
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Facades
1938
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Harlem
1938
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind’s interest in photography developed after his experiences with both music and poetry when he was an English teacher in the New York public school system. His early pictures were said to have been attempts at transferring musical and poetic concepts into images.2 Later, as a young adult, Siskind did everything from making political speeches on soapboxes in Manhattan to becoming a member of the Junior Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL).3

A friend gave Siskind his first camera in 1930. He soon discovered his attraction for the instrument, and almost simultaneously he discovered and joined the Photo league. At the League he found people who shared his political and social concerns and who were capable and willing to discuss technical information about photography. Many of the members were children of Jewish immigrants and most, like Siskind, were well educated. Their exhibited images documented illiteracy, discrimination, and poverty and called for social reforms on behalf of the working classes. Before joining the League, Siskind had already photographed some of the poverty-stricken areas of Manhattan and was searching for reaction and criticism to these pictures. …

As a photographer Siskind explored symbols and metaphors to create a visual relationship that balanced aesthetic concerns with social documents. Throughout his career the contrast of subject and symbol have dominated. …

With his work in Harlem Siskind’s style may have been changing. “In working from the documentary approach, I had always tried to find what kind of meaning you could get in a picture of that kind, and was beginning to feel that I was not getting it. I felt I wasn’t getting anything really personal, really powerful and special…. My documentary picture were very quiet and very formal.”4

Extract from Marcia Battle. “Harlem: A Document,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, pp. 4-6. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

2/ Carl Chiarenza, Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (Little, Brown and Co.,), 6.

3/ Carl Chiarenza, “Form and Content in the Early Work of Aaron Siskind,” The Massachusetts Review 19:4 (Winter 1978): 810.

4/ Jaromir Stephany unpublished interview with Aaron Siskind, February 1963. This interview is in the private papers of Jaormir Stephany.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Savoy Dancers
1938
Gelatin silver print

Savoy Dancers

The “Savoy Dancers” refer to the pioneering African American dancers who developed the Lindy Hop and other swing dances at the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York. Open from 1926 to 1958, the integrated ballroom housed iconic performers like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller who defined the “home of happy feet”.

These legendary dancers revolutionised social dancing by bringing athleticism, airborne aerials, and improvisational jazz styling to the Lindy Hop. Their legacy continues to thrive through modern swing dance communities and archival footage preserved in documentaries like The Spirit Moves.

About the Savoy Ballroom

From 1926 to 1958, the Savoy Ballroom stood at 596 Lenox Avenue as one of the first racially integrated public spaces in the United States. Its 10,000-square-foot, spring-loaded dance floor welcomed thousands nightly and launched a global dance phenomenon. The Savoy hosted legendary artists including Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie, cementing its place at the heart of Harlem’s cultural history.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
St. Joseph’s House – The Catholic Worker Movement
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Grocery Store
1940
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Lady and Lamp
1940
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Street Scene
1940
Gelatin silver print

Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991)
Watermelon Man
1940
Gelatin silver print

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Exhibition: ‘Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body’ at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ

Exhibition dates: 24th January – 28th June, 2026

Curator: Emilia Mickevicius, Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum

Claire A. Warden (Canadian)
Genetics
Nd
From the series Mimesis (2015-ongoing)
Cameraless Photograph
© Claire A. Warden

Surrounded by mirrors

” … the human body does not exist and is not understandable apart from the ‘social construction of reality’.” ~ Ted Polhemus

“Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.” ~ Anthony Giddens

Embodiment is the fundamental condition we share.

~ Embodiment refers to the representation or expression of an abstract idea, quality, or feeling in a tangible, visible, or physical form. It describes a person, action, or object that perfectly exemplifies a concept. (Cambridge Dictionary)

~ At its core, the word stems from the root “embody,” meaning “to give a body to”. Philosophically, it refers to the condition of a subject (like a person) inhabiting or being associated with a physical form. (Oxford Academic)

Giving form to the intangible

~ Embodiment links together both broadly cultural and circumstantial usages, the body taking on its meaning at the intersection of narrative, culture, and social interaction… Nowadays, with the current interest in lived experience and embodiment, we assume that some level of cultural meaning is implied in pre-reflection as well. (Cambridge English Corpus)

~ Pre-reflection describes an implicit, automatic awareness that accompanies human experience before you pause to consciously analyse or think about what you are doing. It is an unmediated, “in-the-moment” state of being. (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)

~ In continental philosophy – most notably the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl – pre-reflective consciousness is the immediate, tacit knowledge that an experience is happening to you.

When you are in the zone, as the energy flows through you, in the background you are implicitly aware of taking a photograph – but not in a reflective state, “I have taken a photograph”.

For me, there is a union of mindfulness, body, subject, camera – a seeming suspension of time and space – which may lead to a “revelatio”, a revelation of spirit, a pulling back of the curtain to reveal what is beyond. As a good friend and fellow photographer Frank Vic observes, “To emerge from “the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence” is to let go of the photographer’s intense desire for control and egoistic attachment. Only by facing the subject with an attitude of utmost humility is it possible for the lens to capture a truly objective and sacred “revelation”.”

In modern psychology, the pre-reflective unconscious refers to how your personal history, organising principles, and mental schemas shape your experience without you actively noticing it (Encyclopaedia.com). Thus, it is how unconsciously aware you are of your surroundings, how informed you are through your conversations and reading, how attuned you are to the energy of the body and the world – that directs your gaze.

Some pertinent quotations below.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. The exhibition is divided into four interesting thematic sections – Surface Tension; Kinetic Beauty; Know Thyself; Enduring. Such a pity there are not more photographs to illustrate the many ideas contained within each section.

Many thankx to the Phoenix Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved and attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.”

Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 120.

” … the human body does not exist and is not understandable apart from the ‘social construction of reality’. Our bodies and our perception of them constitute an important part of our socio-cultural heritage. They are not simply objects which we inherit at birth, but are socialized (enculturated) throughout life and this process of collectively sanctioned bodily modification may serve as an important instrument for our socialization (enculturation) in a more general sense. That is, in learning to have a body, we also begin to learn about our ‘social body’ – our society.”

Ted Polhemus. Social Aspects of the Human Body. Penguin: Harmonsworth, 1978, p. 21 quoted in Morag MacSween. Anorexic Bodies: A Feminist and Sociological Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 115.

“Consumer capitalism, with its efforts to standardise consumption and to shape tastes through advertising, plays a basic role in furthering narcissism. The idea of generating an educated and discerning public has long since succumbed to the pervasiveness of consumerism, which is a ‘society dominated by appearances’. Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the very things the narcissist desires – attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity – through the consumption of the ‘right’ kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.”

Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 172.

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing Claire A. Warden’s photograph Genetics Nd (above) from the series Mimesis (2015-ongoing)

Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body

Each of us moves through the world in a body. Though we are marked by differences in our appearances, abilities, and lived experience, embodiment is the fundamental condition we share. Our bodies both empower and limit us: these vessels hold our joy and suffering, our pleasure and pain. They withstand pressure, scrutiny, and change. Through our bodies we confront the edges of our strength, what is in our control and what is not, and the gaps between how we see ourself and how we are perceived. Bodies are sites of contradiction.

Spanning 150 years of images making, and spotlighting several Arizona based artists, this exhibition explores how artists use photography to grapple with bodily existence in all its dimensionality. The camera is a powerful tool for taking an unflinching look at ourselves and others: examining the body’s surface and physicality, suspending its form in motion, and considering how it bears traces of all we endure, from birth to death and everything in between. As a time-based medium, photography is uniquely poised to incrementally record our continuous physical transformation.

Wall text from the exhibition (in the image above)

Mimesis is an ongoing series of large-scale cameraless, abstract photographs that explore identity, representation, resistance, and Opacity.

Mimesis is an ongoing series that engages identity, representation, and language through abstraction and experimental image-making. The creation of this work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar or unkown is pervasive in American culture. When looking at much of my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of colour with a diverse ethnocultural heritage and one I increasingly tend to resist. That resistance carries through the work as resistance to definition as well as the hegemonic gaze and, instead, emphasizes Opacity and illegibility. These concepts, informed by anti-essentialism and decolonial theory, ultimately make way for my experimental image-making practice as mode to subvert the problematics of representation in photography, particularly in addressing experiences had by people of color.

For this reason, I believe it is important to know that the Mimesis series is photographic – cameraless photographs – and that I developed a cameraless process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter – thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.

Text from the PhMuseum website. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

About the exhibition

Drawn primarily from the collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum, Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body showcases a wide range of historical and contemporary works that explore the ways photographers have represented the human figure and bodily experiences of movement, aging, disability, and more.

Featured works demonstrate how artists have grappled with physicality, dimension, beauty, form, and the politics of the body in the landscape and urban environment. Subjects are presented in the context of growing older, sports, and abstraction, offering audiences the opportunity to consider the body’s ability to morph and bear traces of lived experiences.

Text from the Phoenix Art Museum website

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at right, Richard Avedon Esther Blackmon, sideshow performer, Sidney, Iowa, August 12, 1979 (1979, below)

Surface Tension

How much can you learn about another person by looking at them? Our bodies are the interface between ourselves and the world, but there is often a gap between our exterior presentation and our inner lives. A photograph grants us the license to study someone’s appearance longer than is socially acceptable during real-time interactions, though the viewer must still draw conclusions from what is outwardly visible.

The photographs in this section probe this tension between exteriority and interiority, showcasing what is lost and gained in translating the body’s physicality in the flat plane of an image. By abstracting the body, photographs can help us see the human form anew. Many of these pictures show how skin signifies aesthetic, cultural, and social meanings, even functioning as a canvas for self-expression.

Wall text from the exhibition

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) 'Esther Blackmon, sideshow performer, Sidney, Iowa, August 12, 1979' 1979 (installation view)

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Esther Blackmon, sideshow performer, Sidney, Iowa, August 12, 1979 (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Richard Avedon Archive
Gift of the artist

Photographs of people can both exploit and empower. The power dynamic of a portrait involves not only the interaction between the photographer and subject, but also the viewer’s projections, assumptions and interpretation. Resisting others’ projections of shame about her appearance, Esther Blackmon proclaimed: “I live a normal and happy life.” Born in North Carolina, Blackmon (1926-2003) lived with a hereditary skin disease called ichthyosis which caused dryness and baldness. This unique aspect of her phenotype earned her the nickname “The Alligator Girl.” Actively participating in the carnival industry for 56 years, Blackmon regarded herself with pride. “People born unusual are not freaks … I’d say they are very special people.”

Wall text from the exhibition

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Lipkind 33
1960
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Aaron Siskind Archive
© Aaron Siskind Foundation

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Leon Borensztein Woman with Tattoo, San Francisco (1984, below); at second left bottom, Stephen Marc, Untitled (2017, below); and at third right bottom, Diane Arbus Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. (1970, below)

Leon Borensztein (American, b. 1947)
Woman with Tattoo, San Francisco
1984
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase
© Leon Borensztein

Stephen Marc (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
2017
Inkjet print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Gift of the Artist
© Stephen Marc

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md.
1970
Gelatin silver print

Kinetic Beauty

Athletic pursuits are one form of human achievement. Photographs of the body in motion attest to a fascination with witnessing bodies at the threshold of their physical limits, accomplishing seemingly superhuman feats or embodying physical ideals. These images simultaneously chart another set of limits; the evolution of photographic technology itself. Some pictures are from an athletic context and some are not, but all arrest fluid, operatic movements of the body in a way that was previously inaccessible to real-time vision. Shutter speeds reached 1/1000th of a second by the end of the 19th century and continued to shorten, enabling photographers to dissect instantaneous components of complex motions. “Seeing” faster than the eye can perceive, the camera revealed new dimensions of bodily grace, strength, and power.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at top left, Charles “Teenie” Harris New York Cubans (1941, below); at bottom left, Eadweard J. Muybridge Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85 (1887, below); at second left, Harold Edgerton Golf Drive by Densmore Shute, 1938 (1938, below); at centre left, Terrell Groggins Gabriels and Shields Square Up Round 1 (2018, below); at centre right, Walter Iooss Michael Jordan, Phoenix at Chicago, 1933 (1933, below); and at far right, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon (1983)

Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998)
New York Cubans
1941
Gelatin silver print

New York Cubans baseball player Horacio Martinez leaping above third base at Forbes Field

Eadweard J. Muybridge (English, 1830-1904)
Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85
1887
Collotype
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase

Eadweard J. Muybridge (English, 1830-1904)
Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85 (details)
1887
Collotype
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase

Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990)
Golf Drive by Densmore Shute, 1938
1938
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase
© Harold Edgerton, MIT, courtesy of Palm Press Inc.

Terrell Groggins (American)
Gabriels and Shields Square Up Round 1
2018, printed 2021
Inkjet print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Center for Creative Photography Photojournalism Fund
© Terrell Groggins My Art My Rules

Walter Iooss (American, b. 1943)
Michael Jordan, Phoenix at Chicago, 1993
1993
Inkjet print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Gift of Rajesh B. Patel
© Walter Iooss

This winter, Phoenix Art Museum presents Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body, an exploration of the ways in which photographers across history have represented and reckoned with the human body and its associated dimensionality, evolution, and politicization. Drawn primarily from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, along with select works from the PhxArt Collection and those by Arizona- based contemporary artists, the exhibition showcases more than 80 wide-ranging works that contend with the body’s form, physicality, and limits. Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body will be on view at PhxArt from January 24, 2026, through June 28, 2026.

“Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body offers a view into the human experience that is both compelling and relatable,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “From sports imagery and self-portraiture to abstract compositions, this exhibition considers all aspects of the body in every stage of evolution. We are excited to once again work with the Center for Creative Photography to present a captivating collection of photographic works, shown in conversation with new acquisitions to the Phoenix Art Museum Collection by contemporary voices.”

Spanning works captured from the 19th century through the present, Muscle Memory offers a compelling look at the dynamism of the human body with works by artists such as:

John Gutmann • Richard Avedon • Brian Weil • Lauren Greenfield • Rosalind Fox Solomon • Anne Noggle • Frances Murray • Walter Iooss • Diane Arbus • Manuel Álvarez Bravo • Imogen Cunningham • Arno Rafael Minkkinen • Roy DeCarava • Harold Edgerton • Aaron Siskind • Charles “Teenie” Harris • W. Eugene Smith • Leon Borensztein • Jan Groover • Ittetsu Morishita • John Coplans • Robert Mapplethorpe • Eadweard J. Muybridge • Graciela Iturbide • Barbara Crane • Nan Goldin • William Camargo • Marcus Chormicle • Mehrdad Mirzaie • Claire A. Warden • Zhang Huan

The exhibition’s works are presented across four thematic sections that offer varying views on embodiment and how our bodies at once empower and limit us. Surface Tension considers skin as a surface and what is possible to know about a person by looking at them, including how a subject’s outward appearance can exist in tension with their interiority. Works in this section by artists such as Diane Arbus and John Gutmann spotlight individuals who have changed their outward appearance with tattoos, makeup, and other markings, exploring the human impulse to use the body as a canvas for personal expression.

Kinetic Beauty features the body in motion, with a specific focus on sports imagery. It explores how bodies interact and take shape in athletic settings, particularly those that require high levels of physical performance, endurance, and even contortion. Works in this section include images of bodybuilders by Robert Mapplethorpe and Brian Weil and a photograph by Walter Iooss featuring Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, as well as abstract studies of bodily motion associated with physical training, strength, and aspiration.

Know Thyself highlights the work of photographers who have used the medium of photography, often in the form of serial self-portraiture, to grapple with issues of aging, beauty standards, and self-image. Featured artists in this section include John Coplans, Lauren Greenfield, Anne Noggle, and Rosalind Fox Solomon.

Enduring presents works by Nan Goldin, Ittetsu Morishita, Marcus Chormicle, and others depicting the body as witness and at its physical limits, whether due to physical exertion, illness, injury, or even death and absence, prompting viewers to consider the concepts of endurance and survival.

“Muscle Memory invites audiences to consider the body’s ability to morph in response to and bear traces of lived experience, while also discovering how photographers have used the medium as a tool for self- knowledge and exploration,” said Emilia Mickevicius, the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography. “Works by living Arizona-based artists Claire A. Warden, Mehrdad Mirzaie, Marcus Chormicle, and Anh-Thuy Nguyen infuse the presentation with contemporary perspectives on the body’s legibility, how it holds memory, and how it becomes a site of negotiation between selves and others, both extending and departing from the concerns of the historical works in the exhibition.”

Press release from the Phoenix Art Museum

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon (1983); and at second right, a group of photographs by John Coplans

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at right, a group of photographs by John Coplans

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Self-portrait (Back with arms above)
1984
Gelatin silver print

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Feet, Frontal
1984
Gelatin silver print

Know Thyself

From toxic beauty standards to agism, pressures to conform, and the pathologising of non-formative identities and lifestyles, cultural messaging interrupts the journey to self-acceptance. The pictures in this section speak to finding a home in one’s body and moving between comfort and discomfort along the way. A particular focus here is serial self-portraiture where photographers train the lens on their own bodies as they reckon with aging. Facing themselves with tender curiosity and vulnerability, they wield the camera as a tool of self-knowledge, confronting their mortality and even revealing in erotic joy. Their pictures suggest the transformative power being seen on one’s own terms.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing photographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon

Rosalind Fox Solomon (American, 1930-2025)
New York, NY
1986
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

Rosalind Fox Solomon described photography as a way of “talking about myself.” For five decades Solomon traversed continents documenting expressions of joy, suffering and spirituality across cultures. Simultaneously, she maintained a consistent practice of self-portraiture. In these pictures Solomon looks frankly at her aging body and evolving self, conveying both empathy and self-estrangement. Photographs of nude older women are still taboo today – a product of a culture that values youth as well as images that are conventionally “flattering” – but Solomon’s photographs suggest the power in embracing and representing what is real.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rosalind Fox Solomon (American, 1930-2025)
Rotterdam (Hotel), Netherlands
1986
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated)
1934
Gelatin silver print

Dan Young
My Mother’s Hand on My Father’s Head, 1992
1992
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase
© Dan Young

Enduring

As the saying goes, “the body keeps the score.” The photographs in this gallery explore how the body holds memory. Outwardly visible marks like scars and wrinkles are testaments to what we have survived, traces of time that resonate with the nurture of photographic images. No matter how strong or fortunate we are, each of us must sustain wounds visible and invisible, go through cycles of suffering and healing, and eventually experience death. We also inherit not only physical characteristics but also stories and trauma from our ancestors. The pictures here are reminders of our bodily fragility, but they also brim with aliveness, inspiring reverence for all that human beings have endured across generations.

William Camargo (American, b. 1989)
As Far As I Can Get in 10 Seconds From The Swapmeet Parking Lot to the Liquor Store After Divola
2020
Inkjet print
22 x 18 in.

Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Roy DeCarava Force, New York (1963, below); at centre, George Dureau Wilbert with Hook (Nd, below); and at second right, William Camargo As Far As I Can Get in 10 Seconds From The Swapmeet Parking Lot to the Liquor Store After Divola (2020, above)

Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009)
Force, New York
1963
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase

A woman being arrested at a New York protest

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Wilbert with Hook
Nd
Gelatin silver print

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase
© Graciela Iturbide

Leon Borensztein (American, b. 1947)
Woman with Polka Dots, San Francisco
1984
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona: Purchase
© Leon Borensztein

Phoenix Art Museum
McDowell Road & Central Avenue
1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Monday and Tuesday Museum closed
Wednesday: 10am – 7pm
Thursday – Sunday: 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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Vale Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) – storyteller

June 2026

Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026)
What is Time?
1994
Gelatin silver print
16 × 19 7/8 inches (40.6 × 50.5cm)
Gift of Duane Michals
The Morgan Library & Museum

“Time is the duration of everything, and life is an event, a fluttering of wings.”

Duane Michals

There is no time

Vale the transcendent Duane Michals – storyteller.

Magician, poet, philosopher and dreamer.

An artist, like Joseph Cornell, who I have always felt a special affinity / infinity towards.

I wrote in earlier postings on his work:

“As he says, his work goes beyond description, beyond surfaces, to reveal the subject – not as it looks but as it feels. In his sequences he usually achieves this by posing a question that has no answer, a question that is like a Zen koan… what is the sound of one hand clapping? The grandfather ascends smilingly to heaven with little wings on his back as the child waves goodbye (if youth knew, if age could); the man as human condition turns into a galaxy; and the spirit leaves the body as it was left before. …

Michals staged, narrative scenes take us on a journey into his reality, one which “has entered a realm beyond observation.” He poses difficult questions that force us to examine ideas beyond the world of phenomena, beyond the world of surfaces. He challenges our repressed inner lives and our idealised image of ourselves, disturbing the boundaries of personality, ego, and identity.”1

And

“Duane Michals is one of the greatest photographic storytellers of the twentieth century. His parables – seemingly simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson – resonate, vibrate, with energy, and insight into, the human condition. They are as profound as the air we breathe but cannot see – expressing the invisible, presencing the spiritual. I feel, I know these stories, intimately. Those things-for-which-there-are-no-words. …

There are things here not seen in this photograph. The spirit leaves the body. William Blake and Duane Michals. Enchanted melancholy. The mysterious / music. In swift embrace. In love. In memory. In death. The fluidity of the line of the artist. Things are queer. The world implodes and ravages itself. Paradise is reborn. The letter, and love, from my father that I, also, never did receive. The nature of reality. Truth? … When I was young. What was time?”2

It was Michals great skill as an artist and a human being that enabled us the possibility of accessing some aspect of the mystery of our existence.

Stepping beyond … his spirit has left his body.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Exposing your/self,” on the exhibition ‘Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, November 2014 – February 2015 on the Art Blart website January 30, 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026

2/ Marcus Bunyan. “The things-for-which-there-are-no-words,” on the exhibition ‘Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan’ at The Morgan Library & Museum, October 2019 – February 2020 on the Art Blart website January 24, 2020 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I write with this photograph not to tell you what you can see, rather to express what is invisible.”

Duane Michals 1966 in Johnson, B. (ed.,) 2004, ‘Photography speaks: 150 photographers on their art’, Aperture, New York p. 150

Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026)
The Human Condition
1969
© Duane Michals via DC Moore Gallery
The Morgan Library & Museum

“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.

Philip Gefter. “Duane Michals Searches the Morgan and Finds Himself,” on The New York Times website Oct 29, 2019 [Online] Cited 14/11/2019

Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) 'Things are Queer' 1973

Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026)
Things Are Queer
1973
Nine gelatin silver prints
Images: 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8cm) each
Gift of Duane Michals
The Morgan Library & Museum

Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) 'The Spirit Leaves The Body' 1968

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Spirit Leaves the Body
1968
Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel
The Morgan Library & Museum

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Exhibition: ‘Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 28th June, 2025 – 21st June, 2026

Curators: Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film.

Bob Beerman (American)
Rock Hudson
c. 1953
Sheet: 9 15/16 x 8″ (25.2 x 20.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Silhouetting the celebrity

MoMA always puts on interesting photography exhibitions and this one is no exception. Of course, they have a huge collection to draw from, but it still takes intelligence and curatorial inspiration to bring it all together.

It took me a long time to compile the posting. There were not many media images available but with a bit of digging around on the MoMA collection web pages, and searching online, I managed to find enough photographs to illustrate the exhibition / plus the installation photographs / and the addition of movie posters and magazines to illuminate the films the still photographs were taken from (please note: not in the exhibition). While many of the publicity shots were taken by unknown stills photographers, I have also added bibliographic information for the known photographers where possible.

This would be my only criticism of the exhibition: the inability of the viewer to visualise how these “covered with masking tape, marked up with crayon, or reconfigured with ghostly halos of white-out” photographs were actually used (in the press in everyday life) to create the fantasy ideals of Hollywood glamour stars. Perhaps this was a deliberate curatorial strategy, to concentrate on the pre-production rather than the post-production, to concentrate just on the still photos, without the distraction of further stimuli. And I can understand that decision.

In this posting I can show you three examples of how these still photographs were used: the untouched photograph Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”] by an unknown photographer (1959, below) has then been colourised and used on the front cover of the DVD release of this film; the Limehouse Blues movie poster (1934, below) features a white-out around George Raft’s head, similar to the white-out around Joan Crawford or Rock Hudson (above); and the hair of Elsa Manchester in Elsa Lanchester [in “The Bride of Frankenstein”] by an unknown photographer (1935, below) is graphically stylised and coloured in the The Bride of Frankenstein movie poster (1935, below).

Silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage were all hands-on practices that readied the photographs for the press whilst in press they promoted the desirous ideal of the glamorous movie starlet, heroic action man, the fantasy ready and available for consumption by the reading public: the beautiful heroine available to the male gaze, aspirational for so many young women.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Though Iris Barry, who in 1935 became the founding curator of The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, aimed to preserve the history of moving images as an art form, she didn’t stop at moving images. “She was trying to save the record of film history,” explains Ron Magliozzi, a curator in what is today known as the Department of Film. “When the department was founded, the silent period had just ended. And its whole history was considered irrelevant and of no interest. That’s why she was so aggressive in collecting it. Films were the most important thing, and images from film history were second.”

Today, the Museum’s Film Stills Collection includes well over a million publicity photos, production stills, and more – and it’s not all pristine, glossy prints. In the current exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, many of the images are covered with masking tape, marked up with crayon, or reconfigured with ghostly halos of white-out. It’s an occasionally startling reminder that the manipulation of photographs – and of celebrity itself – long predates Photoshop and Instagram.”

Jason Persse, Assistant Director, Content Team, MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art announces Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, the first major exhibition of Hollywood studio portraiture to be drawn from the Museum’s film stills archive since 1993. On view in the Titus and Morita Galleries, the exhibition will offer a revisionist look at the Department of Film’s photographic archive, examining the evolution of editorial practice before the digital age, AI technology, and social media reshaped the experience of celebrity.

Face Value will feature over 200 works from 1921 to 1996, including studio photography of Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Katharine Hepburn, Dennis Hopper, Lena Horne, Bela Lugosi, Carmen Miranda, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

Text from the MoMA website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 - June 2026

Installation views of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing in the left hand block of 9 photographs of the bottom image, from left to right top row to bottom row: Ray Jones’ Margaret Sullavan c. 1939 (below); Clarence Sinclair Bull’s Hedy Lamarr c. 1940; Adolph L. “Whitey” Schafer’s Rosalind Russell c. 1940; Ray Jones’ Mischa Auer c. 1940; Unknown photographer Harry Belafonte [in “The Angel Levine”] 1970; Irving Lippman’s George Raft c. 1933; Hal Phyfe’s Miriam Hopkins c. 1930; Unknown photographer Dorothy Gish c. 1929; and Imandt’s Joan Bennett c. 1939
Photos: Jonathan Dorado

Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947)
Margaret Sullavan
c. 1939
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 7/8″ (35.2 x 27.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing at right in the bottom image at third left in top row, Unknown photographer Jackie Robinson c. 1950
Photos: Jonathan Dorado

Unknown photographer
Jackie Robinson
c. 1950
Sheet: 10 x 8″ (25.4 x 20.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

The Museum of Modern Art announces Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, the first major exhibition of Hollywood studio portraiture to be drawn from the Museum’s film stills archive since 1993. On view in the Titus and Morita Galleries from June 28, 2025, through June 21, 2026, the exhibition will offer a revisionist look at the Department of Film’s photographic archive, examining the evolution of editorial practice before the digital age, AI technology, and social media reshaped the experience of celebrity.

Face Value will feature over 200 works from 1921to 1996, including studio photography of Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Katharine Hepburn, Dennis Hopper, Lena Horne, Bela Lugosi, Carmen Miranda, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography is organised by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager, and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film.

“Face Value will encourage viewers to see through the facade of glamour at how celebrity is fabricated and exploited,” says Ron Magliozzi. Showcasing work by over 58 photographers, the exhibition will juxtapose “untouched” images like Otto Dyar’s Carole Lombard (c. 1933) with those altered through traditional press practices such as silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage, like James Manatt’s Joan Crawford portrait for the film Letty Lynton (1932). Face Value examines how these methods shaped representations of not only film stars but also sports figures, socialites, and politicians, from Jackie Robinson to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Eleanor Roosevelt. Presented in thematic suites, the installation highlights radical editing techniques, stylised visual motifs, and the gendered aesthetics embedded in the system, offering a revealing perspective on the fabrication of glamour and fame.

Since the Museum’s founding, photography has played a vital role in how it has documented the history of motion pictures. Face Value traces the origin of this early initiative to MoMA’s first film curator, Iris Barry, whose archival efforts led to the acquisition of editorial collections from Photoplay (1911-1980) and Dell (1921-1976), two leading publications that helped define Hollywood’s star system. The exhibition includes images of comic stars Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Lupe Velez, and Mae West; pioneering actress Hattie McDaniel with Ruby Berkley, the first Black accredited Hollywood correspondent; famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart on a Hollywood film set; and the last photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Featuring promotional portraits crafted to cultivate celebrity personas, such as Ray Jones’s Anna May Wong portrait for the film Limehouse Blues, Soul of a Dragon (1934), the exhibition explores how these images were manipulated for public consumption through hands-on editing techniques long before digital tools became standard.

Press release from MoMA

Installation view of the exhibition 'Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 - June 2026 showing a video still from 'Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Benedetta Barzini, Ingrid Superstar, Nat Finkelstein: Danny Williams footage of unknown documentary film shoot' c. 1965, processed 2024

Installation views of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing in the bottom two photographs, video stills from Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Benedetta Barzini, Ingrid Superstar, Nat Finkelstein: Danny Williams footage of unknown documentary film shoot c. 1965, processed 2024 (below)
Photos: Jonathan Dorado

Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Benedetta Barzini, Ingrid Superstar, Nat Finkelstein: Danny Williams footage of unknown documentary film shoot
c. 1965, processed 2024
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Edie Sedgwick dances in Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory during a photoshoot

Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing at top centre, Jacqueline Kennedy with Caroline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr. 1960s; and a bottom centre, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher with Michael Wilding Jr. and Christopher Wilding 1960s
Photo: Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing from top left to right, top to bottom, Unknown photographer Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine 1957 (below); Gene Lester (American, 1910-1994) Dean and Jeannne Martin 1958; Bob Beerman (American) Rock Hudson c. 1953 (top of posting); Unknown photographer Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”] 1959 (below); Unknown photographer Jean Simmons [in “The Big Country”] 1958; Unknown photographer Elizabeth Threatt and Dewey Martin [in “The Big Sky”] 1952; Unknown photographer Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn 1957; Unknown photographer André De Toth and Veronica Lake 1944; Unknown photographer Edmund O’Brien and Tom D’Andrea [in “Fighter Squadron”] 1948; Unknown photographer Ward Bond and Ida Lupino [in “On Dangerous Ground”] 1951; Unknown photographer Aldo Ray and Katharine Hepburn [in “Pat and Mike”] 1952
Photo: Jonathan Dorado

Unknown photographer
Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine [in “Island in the Sun”]
1957
Sheet: 6 15/16 × 9 1/16″ (17.6 × 23 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Unknown photographer
Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”]
1959
Sheet: 8 x 9 15/16″ (20.3 x 25.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

This Earth is Mine (1959) DVD cover

Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988)
Carole Lombard
c. 1933
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 1/2″ (35.2 x 26.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Hollywood stills photographers like Dyar “were not mirroring life, but illusion; their subjects were not humans but gods – of love, of allure, of luxury, perfection incarnate from the golden age of Hollywood glamor”

John Kobal (ed), Hollywood glamor portraits, Courier Corporation, 1976, p.V on the Wikipedia website

Otto Dyar was a prominent stills photographer who began his career at the Paramount studios in the 1920s. Initially working as an assistant on major film productions such as the 1927 ‘Wings’, Dyar quickly rose through the ranks to become one of Hollywood’s most notable image-makers.

During the 1930s and 40s, Dyar developed his own, highly dramatic style of lighting and photography that deviated from the neoclassical glamor of the 1920s. Edgy and expressionistic, Dyar’s photographs pushed the iconic features of movie stars like Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Kay Francis and Joan Crawford to a grittier place that was more in accord with the aesthetics of films made in those decades. Of particular note are Dyar’s star portraits taken outside of the studio, an unusual and daring step at the time.

Despite all the high-contrast lighting, skewed angles and often tiny ‘surrealist’ interventions that point to the influence of photographers like Man Ray, Dyar faithfully accomplished the task of elevating the studio stars to the realm of deities. Like his peers George Hurrell, Ted Allen and Clarence Sinclair Bull, Dyar was not concerned with the psychologies of his sitters. What interested him was amplifying and consolidating the image the stars exuded in their roles, which was usually so powerful that it eclipsed the ‘real’ person that was in front of the camera.

Vigen Galstyan. “Dyar, Otto,” on the Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation website 2015 [Online] Cited 02/04/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988)
Louise Brooks
c. 1927
Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 15/16″ (35.4 x 27.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988)
Anna May Wong
1930s
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 7/8″ (35.2 x 27.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947)
Anna May Wong [in “Limehouse Blues”]
1934
Sheet: 12 7/8 x 10″ (32.7 x 25.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Limehouse Blues (1934) movie poster

Unknown photographer
Anna May Wong
c. 1934
MoMA Film Stills Archive
Sheet: 8 x 6″ (20.3 x 15.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Unknown photographer
Myrna Loy [in “Across the Pacific”]
1926
Sheet: 11 x 14″ (27.9 x 35.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Advertisement for the American romantic adventure film Across the Pacific (1926) with Monte Blue and Myrna Loy, on pages 6 and 7 of the October 26, 1926 Film Daily

John Miehle (American, 1902-1952)
Dolores del Rio and Edmund Lowe [in “The Bad One”]
1930
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 15/16″ (35.2 x 27.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

John Miehle was born on August 7, 1902 in Los Angeles, California. Being born so close to Hollywood Miehle went to work as an assistant camera man on the 1931 movie “Delicious” starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.

He then worked exclusively in the Camera and Electrical Department doing uncredited still photography on some of the best known films, such as “What Price Hollywood?,” “Rain,” “Little Women,” “Top Hat,” “Kitty Foyle,” “Rope” and “Portrait of Jennie.”

He photographed many of the greats as well including Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ann Harding, William Powell, Joel McCrea, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Delores Del Rio, Randolph Scott, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ruth Hussey, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymoore, Laraine Day, Franchot Tone, Ann Blyth, Farley Granger, and Dana Andrews…

In addition, he did many publicity shots of such stars as Carole Lombard, Marilyn Monroe, and Lucille Ball.

Don’t Forget The Illustrator! “The Classics and “Ginger Rogers” photographer John Miehle,” on the Vintage Movie Star Photos blog Thursday, March 28, 2013 [Online] Cited 12/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

The Bad One (1930) movie poster

William Walling Jr (American, 1904-1983)
Carole Lombard
c. 1933
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 11 15/16″ (35.2 x 30.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

William Richard Walling, Jr. (October 6, 1904 – December 11, 1983) was an American actor, inventor, and portrait photographer for film studios.

Robert Coburn (American, 1900-1990)
Vera Zorina [in “The Goldywyn Follies”]
c. 1937
Sheet: 13 13/16 x 10 15/16″ (35.1 x 27.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Eva Brigitta Hartwig (January 2, 1917 – April 9, 2003), known professionally as Vera Zorina, was a German-Norwegian ballerina, theatre and film actress, and choreographer, chiefly remembered for her films choreographed by her husband George Balanchine. They include the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue sequence from On Your Toes, The Goldwyn Follies, I Was an Adventuress with Erich Von Stroheim and Peter Lorre, Louisiana Purchase with Bob Hope, and dancing to “That Old Black Magic” in Paramount Pictures’ Star Spangled Rhythm.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Robert Coburn was one of the most influential portrait photographers working in the major Hollywood movie studios from the 1930’s to 1960’s. His star subjects included Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, Carole Lombard, William Holden, Glenn Ford, and Orson Welles. Coburn’s most infamous portraits immortalised Hollywood’s greatest icons and helped to define this era as the Golden Age of Cinema. In 1940, Robert Coburn began a twenty-year career with Columbia Pictures as the head of the still production department and the studio’s chief portrait photographer for many landmark films including “Picnic”, “Gilda”, and “The Big Heat”.

Text from the Fahey/Klein Gallery website

Goldwyn Follies (1937) movie poster

Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography Introductory text

For MoMA’s founding film curator, Iris Barry, building an archive of images that documented the history of motion pictures was second only to collecting films. Photographs from the study collection that she created were among the first works exhibited in MoMA’s theater gallery. Barry’s initiative eventually led to the acquisition of editorial archives from Photoplay (1911-1980) and Dell (1921-1976), leading fan magazine publishers supporting the Hollywood star system. The portrait photography featured in these publications was produced by film studios to promote the glamorous celebrities under contract to them. Face Value looks at these images and surveys how they were manipulated for public consumption in the decades before digital tools, AI technology, and social media revolutionized the process.

Over sixty photographers are represented in this installation, which intermingles images that survive untouched with those that show evidence of the hands-on practices that readied them for the press. The standard techniques used – silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage – were applied not only to photographs of entertainers but to sports figures, socialites, and politicians as well. Organised in suites that highlight radical editing practices, stylised visual motifs, and the gender stereotypes inherent in the studio system, the exhibition offers a demystifying perspective on the glamour of celebrity.

Wall text from the exhibition

George P. Hommel (American, 1901-1953)
Clara Bow
c. 1929
Sheet: 14 x 11″ (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Overshadowed by the work of 1920s Paramount colleagues Donald Biddle Keyes and Eugene Robert Richee, stillsman George P. Hommel crafted thoughtful portraits highlighting both the beauty and sorrow of those he photographed. Like Keyes, the peripatetic Hommel always looked for new challenges, new opportunities, keeping him on the move. Unobstrusive and elegant, Hommel’s work reveals hidden depths in those he shot. …

Hommel’s straightforward portraiture captured the vulnerability of his sitters, revealing a wistful and often melancholic look in their expressive eyes. His pensive work focused on serious matters, not straining to create fleeting moods but revealing the heart of those he photographed. Employing simple, dark-textured background, Hommel focused on the eyes and lips, creating a sharp image with an often soft-focus background. His portraits often feature shadows and strong angular lines, creating dramatic composition. Hommel could also capture the sometimes insouciant or even overly exuberant emotions of sitters, often covering their vulnerability and pain, such as in his Pierrot portraits of Clara Bow as clown.

lmharnisch. “Mary Mallory / Hollywood Heights: George P. Hommel, Pensive Photographer,” on The Daily Mirror website, July 27, 2020 [Online] Cited 12/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

James Manatt (American, 1896-1989)
Joan Crawford [in “Letty Lynton”]
1932
Sheet: 13 x 10″ (33 x 25.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Letty Lynton (1932) movie posters

Elmer Fryer (American, 1898-1944)
Lili Damita [in “The Match King”]
c. 1932
Sheet: 14 1/16 x 11″ (35.7 x 27.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

The Match King (1932) movie poster

Bert Longworth (American, 1893-1964)
Amelia Earhart with Helen Hayes [on set of “A Farewell to Arms”]
1932
Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 7/8″ (35.4 x 27.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

As the studio system came into place with the advent of talkies, studios hired many stillsmen to take scene stills, off-camera images, and candids of both above and below the line talent. Photographers took massive amounts of stills around the lot, at public events, premieres, at homes, in posed shots, to be widely distributed to magazines and newspapers for free publicity promoting upcoming films, new talent, and established stars. The journals, fan magazines, and newspapers splashed these images throughout their pages, building awareness and star popularity.

Bert “Buddy” Longworth was one of the stills photographers taking these images. Longworth began his career shooting scene stills at MGM for Greta Garbo’s first three films, including “Flesh and the Devil,” with Longworth capturing the passion of Garbo and John Gilbert as they fell in love. He was employed for a short time at Paramount, but from 1929 on, he worked at Warner Bros. as an action specialist, working on Busby Berkeley’s spectacular musicals, crime pictures, off-set candids, as well as portraits. Scholar David Shields calls him “Hollywood’s foremost expressionist, often using unusual perspective, occasional use of multiple exposures.”

lmharnisch. “Mary Mallory / Hollywood Heights: Bert Longworth and ‘Hold Still, Hollywood’,” on The Daily Mirror website, June 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 12/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

A Farewell To Arms (1932) movie poster

Unknown photographer
Elsa Lanchester [in “The Bride of Frankenstein”]
1935
Sheet: 13 1/2 x 9 3/16″ (34.3 x 23.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) movie poster

I want to talk more about the edited photographs. In many of the photos white-out has been used to separate the subject’s head or face – and in one notable case, their bare legs – from the rest of the image. What are some ways in which these disembodied segments were used by the studios and by the magazines?

RM: We know they were from Photoplay magazine, so if we have a still that’s been edited for Photoplay, Cara went and looked for the issue that published the photograph to see how it was used. It might have been a feature on women’s legs, so that’s why they only focused on the legs.

There’s one grouping of photographs, I call it the “eat face grouping,” where the stars are very close up. There’s a photograph of someone eating someone’s chin. Those were all taken for a particular issue of Photoplay – that’s why they’re all edited in the same way.

With research and detective work you can determine how they were actually used in print. The floating heads, they would attach to biographies. They call that silhouetting, with the white-out.

CS: A lot of the uses I found were very gossipy, which was interesting, a lot of rumor columns. And then of course, like Ron said, highlighting certain aspects of celebrities’ bodies or features.

Back in 1980 MoMA’s exhibition Hollywood Portrait Photographers, 1921 to 1941 actually used a couple of the same images that appear in this show. But that nnnexhibition celebrated the artistry and glamor of these images. Why did you choose to focus more on the ways that these images have been manipulated and edited?

RM: The audience for photographs like this has changed. In 1980 there was a whole generation of people who knew who these performers were, who appreciated them as performers and appreciated their celebrity. Nowadays, younger audiences, in many cases, have no idea who these folks are. Even we sometimes have trouble identifying everyone. Displaying them in that way seemed dated. We wanted to mount them in a way that reflected how visitors today would need to look at them.

The photographs in 1980 were all matted in a very formal way that encouraged appreciation for the beauty of the photograph. I wasn’t interested in how beautiful the images were. I wasn’t interested in the celebrities. We’re mostly interested in the photographs. I wanted them to look like working photographs, and that’s reflected in the way they’re displayed. We did ours on plexi traps, which turned out to be very elegant, but the notion was that it would be a less precious way of mounting them so we would look at them in a less precious way.

The other thing we did differently was to have large numbers of photographs grouped in very dense clusters. To me that reflects social media today. The way we encounter images daily is so dense, and we’re forced to sort through a lot of images that come our way in any one moment. So I wanted visitors to have a contemporary view. It was meant to reflect a digital-age perspective, because analog-versus-digital was a subtext of the show in our heads.

There were two shows that were touchstones for this one: the Hollywood Portrait show of 1980, and the Fame After Photography show, a wonderful show in 1999 that MoMA’s Photography department mounted. They borrowed a lot of film stills for that show, which was also investigating celebrity and fame.

Ron Magliozzi, Cara Shatzman, Jason Persse. “Cropped, Chopped, and Silhouetted: Taking Celebrity at Face Value,” in the MoMA magazine on the MoMA website Sep 17, 2025 [Online] Cited 10/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Unknown photographer
Louis Armstrong [in “Cabin in the Sky”]
1943
Sheet: 8 x 10″ (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Cabin in the sky (1943) movie poster

Unknown photographer
Hattie McDaniel and Ruby Berkley Goodwin
c. 1948
Sheet: 9 1/16 x 7″ (23 x 17.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

“[Ruby Berkley Goodwin] was also Hattie McDaniel’s publicist. And she was Ethel Waters’s publicist. She was the first Black American to have a syndicated newspaper column. She wrote this very famous autobiography called It’s Good to Be Black that was very, very popular. She was a poet. She was a fascinating person, and I was not familiar with her. That was a great aspect of learning about all of these people in these photographs.”

Ron Magliozzi, Cara Shatzman, Jason Persse. “Cropped, Chopped, and Silhouetted: Taking Celebrity at Face Value,” in the MoMA magazine on the MoMA website Sep 17, 2025 [Oline] Cited 10/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Unknown photographer
Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis
c. 1950 (detail)
Sheet: 8 1/16 x 10″ (20.5 x 25.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Elvis Presley [Fans’ Star Library magazine, No. 13]
1959
Sheet: 7 x 5 1/8″ (17.8 x 13cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-Canadian born Mardin, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), 1908-2002)
Anna Magnani
1959
Sheet: 20 x 15 15/16″ (50.8 x 40.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Anna Maria Magnani (Italian, 1908-1973)

Anna Maria Magnani (Italian; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was the first Italian woman to win an Academy Award.

Born and raised in Rome, Italy or Alexandria, she worked her way through Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as “La Lupa”, the “perennial toast of Rome” and a “living she-wolf symbol” of the cinema. Time described her personality as “fiery”, and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was “volcanic”. In the realm of Italian cinema, she was “passionate, fearless, and exciting”, an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls “the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema.” Director Roberto Rossellini called her “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse”. Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.

After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognised for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of “earthy lower-class women” in such films as L’Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was “one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren
c. 1963
Sheet: 8 x 10″ (20.3 x 25.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Ray Wilson
Mia Farrow [in “Rosemary’s Baby”]
c. 1967
Sheet: 12 x 8 3/16″ (30.5 x 20.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) movie poster

Kathleen Ballard
Lena Horne
1975
Sheet: 13 1/16 x 9″ (33.2 x 22.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

The Museum of Modern Art
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Phone: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years’ at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington

Exhibition dates: 20th June, 2025 – 7th June, 2026

Curator: Ann Shumard, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington

Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) 'John C. Calhoun' 1849 from the exhibition 'From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography's Formative Years' at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 2025 - June 2026

Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896)
John C. Calhoun
1849
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Image/Sight: 20.2 x 15cm (7 15/16 x 5 7/8″)
Mat (brass): 24.3 x 19.4cm (9 9/16 x 7 5/8″)
Frame: 35 x 30 x 2.5cm (13 3/4 x 11 13/16 x 1″)
Case closed: 5.8 x 34.3 x 39.7cm (2 5/16 x 13 1/2 x 15 5/8″)
Case open: 5.8 x 72.7 x 39.7cm (2 5/16 x 28 5/8 x 15 5/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of Stephan Loewentheil

Mathew Brady’s mastery of the whole plate is on full display in this compelling portrait – the last daguerreotype made of Senator John C. Calhoun before his death in 1850. A contemporary praised the portrait as one of “the best which Mr. Brady has taken himself,” adding, “So perfect was it regarded by the family [of Calhoun], that several copies of it have been made at their request.” Commenting on his subject’s most notable feature, Brady observed, “Calhoun’s eye was startling, and almost hypnotised me.” A painting based on this daguerreotype was commissioned by Brady and now hangs in the U.S. Senate.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

High-class portraits

Eight white men (all whole-plate daguerreotypes) and one black woman (whole-plate tintype) – sounds about right.

“To put the era’s pricing in context, a year’s supply of coal for a working-class family in 1850 cost $15 – the minimum price for a Southworth & Hawes whole-plate daguerreotype. The whole plate was therefore too expensive for most consumers… A whole-plate tintype was likely priced from $.75 to $1 in the 1860s, when the average daily wage of a labourer was only $2.”

Picture and price / detail and scale / delicacy of lights and shadows / beauty of execution – execution being the operative word, considering the upcoming devastation of the American Civil War.

Thus, from unapologetic enslaver (Calhoun) who “staunchly defended chattel slavery and its expansion beyond the American South” and whose painting based on Brady’s daguerreotype hangs in the American senate (really!) – to an unidentified literate Black woman, birthplace unknown, born May 10, 1811 taken by an unknown photographer.

I know which one I would rather honour.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Competition prompted photographers such as Mathew Brady and Southworth & Hawes to produce advertisements that provided a wealth of detail about the services offered by their respective establishments … I am inclined to think that word of mouth may well have played a greater role in motivating patronage. In the case of Brady and Southworth & Hawes, the knowledge that these studios counted national celebrities among their clientele could have been a strong inducement for the general public to patronise them as well. …

While the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of early photography is substantial, it’s the rare whole-plate daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes that stand out for their detail and scale. This exhibition allows visitors to consider how new photographic processes impacted the quality and appeal of the medium … As an aside, the impetus for ‘From Shadow to Substance’ was the extraordinary gift to the museum in 2023 of Mathew Brady’s iconic whole-plate daguerreotype of the powerful antebellum senator John C. Calhoun. A subsequent review of other whole-plates in the Portrait Gallery’s collection sparked consideration of the format’s staying power as a top-of-the-line offering through the succession of early photographic processes. This is the story the exhibition seeks to illuminate.”

Ann Shumard, Senior Curator of Photographs quoted in Kate Garibaldi. “How Portrait Photography’s ‘Grand-Scale’ Origins Changed History,” on the Petapixel website Aug 01, 2025 [Online] Cited 26/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) John C. Calhoun 1849 (above)

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Francis D’Avignon (French, 1813 – c. 1871) Copy after Mathew B. Brady (American, 1823? – 15 Jan 1896) John Caldwell Calhoun, 18 Mar 1782 – 31 Mar 1850 1850

Francis D’Avignon (French, 1813 – c. 1871)
Copy after
Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896)
John Caldwell Calhoun, 18 Mar 1782 – 31 Mar 1850
1850
Lithograph on paper
Sheet: 56.7 x 40.6cm (22 5/16 x 16″)
Book: The Gallery of Illustrious Americans
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

During the first half of the nineteenth century, John C. Calhoun held sway as one of the nation’s most influential politicians. While serving as a senator from South Carolina (1832-1843; 1845-1850), he was unyielding in his advocacy for Southern interests. Under the banner of states’ rights, he supported the concept of nullification. This doctrine maintained that states had the authority to ignore federal laws by declaring them null and void. An unapologetic enslaver, Calhoun staunchly defended chattel slavery and its expansion beyond the American South. Though he died more than a decade before the Civil War began, his views were widely embraced in the Southern states. They ultimately provided justification for secession from the Union. Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype of Calhoun, on view nearby, is faithfully reproduced in this print. It is one of twelve lithographic portraits in a portfolio published by Brady and titled The Gallery of Illustrious Americans.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation views of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026

Photographers seeking customers during the medium’s early years often urged the public to “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade.” Hinting at life’s fragility, this tagline underscored photography’s ability to capture a fleeting likeness and preserve it for posterity. Portraits in the impressive whole-plate format – measuring 8.5 x 6.5 inches – were among the premier offerings of the nation’s leading photographic studios.

Drawing on the National Portrait Gallery’s extensive early photography collection, this exhibition traces the evolution of the grand-scale, whole-plate format from the high-end daguerreotype to the mid-range ambrotype to the more affordable tintype. Examples of whole plates in each of these mediums illustrate how the format evolved as new photographic processes were introduced. Featured works include daguerreotypes representing U.S. senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, as well as papal nuncio Gaetano Bedini; an ambrotype portrait of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett; and a tintype likeness of an unidentified African American woman.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Southworth & Hawes’ Issac P. Davis 1771-1855 and William Hickling Prescott 1796-1859 c. 1850 (below)

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862)
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894)
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Isaac P. Davis, 7 Oct 1771 – 13 Jan 1855
William Hickling Prescott, 4 May 1796 – 28 Jan 1859
c. 1850
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Image/Sight: 20.3 x 15.2cm (8 × 6″)
Mat (brass): 23.6 x 18.6cm (9 5/16 x 7 5/16″)
Case open: 25.3 x 40.2 x 2.3cm (9 15/16 x 15 13/16 x 7/8″)
Case closed: 25.3 x 20.7 x 3.5cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/8 x 1 3/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Purchase funded by the photography acquisitions endowment established by the Joseph L. and Emily K. Gidwitz Memorial Foundation

Isaac P. Davis, 7 Oct 1771 – 13 Jan 1855
Born Plymouth, Massachusetts

William Hickling Prescott, 4 May 1796 – 28 Jan 1859
Born Salem, Massachusetts

This portrait depicts two prominent Bostonians who enjoyed considerable success in their respective careers and were also known for their philanthropy. Isaac P. Davis (left) amassed a sizeable fortune in manufacturing and real estate. An original member of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, which Paul Revere helped found, he was also a patron of American artists, including Gilbert Stuart. Historian William H. Prescott (right) first earned international acclaim for his three-volume History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1838). Blind in one eye and with low vision in the other, Prescott was a generous supporter of Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 Southworth & Hawes’ Lemuel Shaw 1787-1861 c. 1851 (below)

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862)
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894)
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Lemuel Shaw, 9 Jan 1781 – 30 Mar 1861
c. 1851
Whole-plate daguerreotype with silver-plated copper sheet support
Plate (sight): 21.5 x 16cm (8 7/16 x 6 5/16″)
Case Open: 23.4 x 36.3 x 0.9cm (9 3/16 x 14 5/16 x 3/8″)
Case Closed: 23.4 x 18.2 x 1.8cm (9 3/16 x 7 3/16 x 11/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund

Lemuel Shaw, 9 Jan 1781 – 30 Mar 1861
Born Barnstable, Massachusetts

The impact of rulings by Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court (1830-1860), extended well beyond the borders of his home state. Particularly in cases affecting business and industry, his decisions influenced commercial law interpretation in courts throughout the nation. He also rendered judgments in key cases concerning the fate of those who had escaped from their enslavers. Though personally opposed to slavery, Shaw believed it was “too deeply interwoven in the texture of society to be wholly or speedily eradicated.” In 1851, he issued the principal opinion supporting the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing showing Southworth & Hawes’ Jonas Chickering 1853 (below)

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862)
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894)
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Jonas Chickering, 5 Apr 1798 – 8 Dec 1853
1853
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Image: 20 x 15cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8″)
Frame: 31.1 x 25.7 x 2.5cm (12 1/4 x 10 1/8 x 1″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Jonas Chickering, 5 Apr 1798 – 8 Dec 1853
Born Mason Village, New Hampshire

“The father of American piano making,” Jonas Chickering advanced the development of a one-piece, cast-iron frame that revolutionised piano construction. The result was an instrument that could withstand the tension exerted by its strings and resist extremes in temperature and humidity that impacted its ability to remain in tune. Chickering’s patented innovations also yielded pianos of greater volume and superior resonance. Honoured at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London, his pianos became the instruments of choice in U.S. and international concert halls.

When he posed for this portrait by Boston’s premier daguerreotypists, Chickering was at the zenith of his career.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Mathew B. Brady’s John Frederick Kensett 1816-1872 c. 1856 (below)

Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896)
John Frederick Kensett, 22 Mar 1816 – 15 Dec 1872
c. 1856
Whole-plate ambrotype
Image: 18.4 x 13.2cm (7 1/4 x 5 3/16″)
Case Open: 23 x 36.4cm (9 1/16 x 14 5/16″)
Case Closed: 23 x 18.4cm (9 1/16 x 7 1/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

John Frederick Kensett, 22 Mar 1816 – 15 Dec 1872
Born Cheshire, Connecticut

In a newspaper advertisement that was published on September 29, 1855, photographer Mathew Brady announced he was now offering “AMBROTYPES – a New Style of Picture on Glass, more durable and perfect than any known method of portraiture.”

Brady’s ambrotype represents artist and engraver John Frederick Kensett, one of the most popular members of the Hudson River School’s second generation of American landscape painters. Kensett was admired for his keen observations of nature, refined compositions, and sensitive rendering of light. A member of the prestigious National Academy, he helped found New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

National Portrait Gallery Presents “From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years”

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present “From Shadow to Substance: Grand Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years” June 20 through June 7, 2026. Drawing from the museum’s extensive early photography collection, this exhibition traces the evolution of the grand scale, whole-plate portrait format from the high-end daguerreotype and mid-range ambrotype to the more affordable tintype. The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Photographs Ann Shumard.

Photographers seeking customers during the medium’s early years, from 1840 to 1860, often urged the public to “Secure the shadow ere the substance fade.” Hinting at life’s fragility, this tagline underscored photography’s ability to capture a fleeting likeness and preserve it for posterity. Portraits in the impressive whole-plate format – measuring 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches – were among the premier offerings of the nation’s leading photographic studios.

“This exhibition marks the first time these whole-plate daguerreotype, ambrotype and tintype portraits will be shown together at the Portrait Gallery,” Shumard said. Examples of whole plates in each of these mediums illustrate how the format evolved as new photographic processes were introduced. Featured works include daguerreotypes representing U.S. Senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, an ambrotype portrait of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett and a tintype likeness of an unidentified African American woman. Also included are original advertisements issued by photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, and Mathew B. Brady to promote their respective businesses. The exhibition will be presented in the Early Photography Alcove on the museum’s first floor.

Press release from the National Portrait Gallery

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing at left, Southworth & Hawes’ Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1845; and at right, Unidentified photographer Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1850

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) 'Daniel Webster 1782-1852' c. 1845

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862)
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894)
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Daniel Webster 1782-1852
c. 1845
Whole plate copy daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund

Daniel Webster 1782-1852
Born Salisbury, New Hampshire

Daniel Webster emerged as a major force in national politics at a time when rising sectionalism threatened to split the country apart. During his service in the House (1823-1827) and Senate (1827-1841; 1845-1850), Webster’s brilliant orations in defence of the Union marked him as one of the great public figures of his generation.

Boston-based photographers Southworth & Hawes excelled in creating whole-plate daguerreotypes of unrivalled quality. Consequently, their studio attracted numerous prominent figures, including Webster. Their majestic Webster portrait was so popular that it may have inspired them to produce this daguerreotype, a copy of the original.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Unidentified photographer
Daniel Webster 1782-1852
c. 1850
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

A sixth-plate daguerreotype such as this portrait of Daniel Webster, would have sold for a fraction of the cost of a whole plate. To put the era’s pricing in context, a year’s supply of coal for a working-class family in 1850 cost $15 – the minimum price for a Southworth & Hawes whole-plate daguerreotype. The whole plate was therefore too expensive for most consumers.

Retailing for about $3, a sixth-plate was a more affordable option. There were tradeoffs, however. While the whole plate allowed for a dramatic, standing view of Webster, the Sith-plate accommodated only a bust-length image.

In a period when American federalism faced increasing challenges from states’-rights supporters, Daniel Webster emerged as one of the Union’s most eloquent defenders. Having gained acclaim as a lawyer who argued some of the young republic’s pivotal Supreme Court cases, Webster became a major force in national politics through his service in the House and in the Senate. There, his brilliant orations on behalf of the indivisibility of the Union marked him as one of the greatest public figures of his generation. Despite his national stature, Webster fell short of mustering the broad support that might have won him the presidency.

This daguerreotype represents Webster around the time of his controversial endorsement of the Compromise of 1850. In supporting the measure, Webster sought to preserve the Union through concession and compromise but succeeded principally in incurring the wrath of his northern constituents, who abhorred the legislation’s Fugitive Slave Act. Although attacks from his critics left Webster shaken and burdened by “the crushing weight of anxiety and responsibility,” he soldiered on until a liver ailment claimed his life in October 1852. The evergreen sprig preserved with this daguerreotype serves as a reminder of Webster’s endurance as a symbol and an icon in American history.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a wood engraving by an unidentified artist of Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Rooms c. 1849 (below)

Unidentified Artist
Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Rooms
c. 1849
Wood engraving
20 x 12.7cm (7 7/8 x 5″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of an anonymous donor in honour of Carlos G. Vertanssian

In 1843, photographer Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) formed a creative partnership that yielded daguerreotypes unrivalled for their artistry and technical achievement. Committed to the highest standards, the duo excelled in producing beautiful composed, evocative portraits, particularly in the large (8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.) and technically demanding whole-plate format.

In this advertisement for their Boston studio, Southworth & Hawes offered potential customers the assurance: ‘In style of execution and picturesque effect – in boldness of character and beauty of expression – in variety of size and delicacy of lights and shadows, we shall aim at the highest perfection’.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862)
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894)
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Gaetano Bedini, 1806-1864
1853
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Image: 20 x 15cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8″)
Case Open: 25.4 x 40.8 x 1cm (10 x 16 1/16 x 3/8″)
Case Closed: 23.1 x 18.1 x 1.7cm (9 1/8 x 7 1/8 x 11/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund

Gaetano Bedini, 1806-1864
Born Sinigaglia, Italy

In 1853, Italian archbishop Gaetano Bedini travelled to the United States at the request of Pope Pius IX to assess the condition of the Catholic Church in North America and to study the possibility of establishing a papal mission in Washington, D.C. Bedini’s multi-month, fact-finding tour coincided with an intense wave of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant feeling fanned by the newly ascendant American (or Know-Nothing) Party. In several cities, his presence sparked hostile demonstrations. Upon returning to the Vatican, Bedini advocated successfully for the creation of a North American College in Rome to prepare Roman Catholic clergy for service in the United States.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a wood engraving by an unidentified artist of Brady’s Daguerreotypes 1854 (below)

Unidentified Artist
Brady’s Daguerreotypes
1854
Wood engraving on paper
Image: 21.8 x 14.8cm (8 9/16 x 5 13/16″)
Sheet: 24 x 18.6cm (9 7/16 x 7 5/16″)
Mat: 45.8 x 35.6cm (18 1/16 x 14″)
Published in the Illustrated American Biography, 1854
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of George S. Whiteley IV

Mathew Brady placed this full-page advertisement in the Illustrated American Biography, a publication that marketed itself as a biographical volume but was actually a glorified business directory. With its cutaway image of a camera, Brady’s ad presents a fanciful view of the process by which sunlight passes through the camera’s lens to produce an image.

In 1851, Mathew Brady submitted forty-eight daguerreotypes to the “Great Exhibition,” the vast international fair organised by Britain’s Prince Albert at the Crystal Palace in London. A critic for the London Illustrated News noted, “The likenesses of various distinguished Americans by Mr. Brady are notable examples of this style of art.” It is reasonable to assume that whole-plate portraits were among the works Brady exhibited. When jurors pronounced his daguerreotypes “excellent for beauty of execution,” he proudly claimed one of the fair’s highly coveted medals.

Well aware of the marketing value of his prize, Brady touted it in full-page advertisements, such as this example. Presenting a cutaway image of a camera’s interior, the ad offers a fanciful view of the way in which sunlight, represented by an allegorical figure, passes through the lens to produce an image.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a whole-plate tintype by an unidentified photographer of an Unidentified Woman c. 1865 (below)

Unidentified photographer
Unidentified Woman
c. 1865
Whole-plate tintype
Image/Sheet: 21.6 x 15.2 cm (8 1/2 x 6″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Unidentified Woman
Birthplace unknown

A penciled note attached to the back of this tintype reads simply, “Born May 10 1811.” Regrettably, the woman pictured is not otherwise identified. However, her handsome dress, her gold-accented jewelry, the book on the table beside her, and the slim volume in her hands suggest she was a literate woman who could afford a top-of-the-line tintype.

This portrait’s large scale and studio setting distinguish it from the small, inexpensive tintypes commonly produced by itinerant photographers. A whole-plate tintype such as this was likely priced from $.75 to $1 in the 1860s, when the average daily wage of a labourer was only $2.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

National Portrait Gallery
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Washington, DC 20001

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘Martin Parr: Global Warning’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

“Through his surreal, dream sequences captured in pop colour, punctum laden reality, Parr observed the absurdities of life on this planet…” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 24th May, 2026

Curators: Quentin Bajac, in collaboration with Martin Parr and Clémentine de la Féronnière

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'United Arab Emirates, Dubai' 2007

“Life is an act of consumption.

To consume is to live.”

From the film Jupiter Ascending 2015

“We are living in a time when, to borrow a phrase and book title of Sigmund Freud’s, civilization and its discontents are becoming painfully evident to us all. Our machine age technology with its private greed, ecologically disastrous policies, crass materialism, human alienation, incessant strife and conflict, and the portent of man’s destroying himself by his own recklessness, is taking its toll in terms of our confidence and optimism about life. …

John Anson Warner. “Introduction” to The Life & Art of the North American Indian. London: Hamlyn, 1975, p. 6.

A bewitching eye / the unfolding moment

A bewitching eye refers to eyes that are so powerfully, seductively attractive or charming that they appear to cast a spell, mesmerising or enchanting an onlooker. They possess an irresistible, magnetic allure that captivates the viewer, having an almost magical ability to draw someone in. This description could metaphorically be applied to the photographs of the legendary (and I don’t use that word lightly) contemporary British photographer Martin Parr (1952-2025).

Parr was an observer of life with a socially critical eye. Through his surreal, dream sequences captured in pop colour, punctum laden reality, Parr observed the absurdities of life on this planet – human, animal, inanimate – with curiosity and a sense of wonder even while questioning our path to destruction. While this exhibition is split into various sections – Leisure & waste lands; Last Chance To Buy; Small World; The Animal Kingdom; and Technological Addictions – in reality most of his images from each of the sections could fit into any other, for the whole world is interconnected in the excesses and grotesqueness of modern life, of civilization and its discontents.

Parr’s exploration of the pyschogeography of the urbanscape, the exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places, is damming in its technicolor coat of glory. Mass tourism takes us to leisure spaces like the beach where technology is used to take selfies and mountains of waste pile up near the water’s edge. Mass human, mass cultivation (of palm oil or eucalyptus trees for example) is causing mass extinction of species across the planet. Mass consumption means that we are using the Earth’s resources indiscriminately to fuel (ha!) our desire for the latest, larger four-wheel drive we can get our hands on, the latest fashions that end up in landfill every 6 month cycle when they are not bought, or the brightest, pinkest, must luscious cup cakes you have ever seen in your life.

Parr’s colour saturated photos draw us into this consumptive world where the body is racked by disease, where the patient will soon be on life support. Through his mesmerising, enchanting, multilicious photographs he pokes a great big subversive stick at our follies, excesses, self-destructive desires. Unfortunately, while Parr’s photos seep into our subconscious, most images have little power to change public and personal opinion – all they can do is proffer alternate visions and interpretations of the world and hope that some glimmer of recognition of the environmental damage we are doing will permeate the mind of the viewer.

Of course, Parr’s famous photographs did not appear out of thin air. He was a dedicated photographer whose art practice required years of hard work, talent and skill to obtain his images. He emphasises that, “you have to look at the history of photography and learn what they have done and achieved and apply that, think about it and have it in the back of your head and then you can apply that to your own work.” By doing that, “you may have the rare opportunity actually to develop your own voice, and you can become a photographer with a particular voice.”

“What you are going to do, of course, is to find a good connection to the world out there. It is the quality of that connection that is really important. So, you find a subject you feel strongly about. Then work out how to articulate that and that hopefully will give you momentum for you to get good work.”

Nothing comes without hard work and perseverance.

In the video below where he is giving advice to young photographers he states that he might get only ten great photographs a year, sometimes only one, but he shoots heap of photographs and then discards the dross. What he also says that is really important is that he is attentive to the unfolding moment, he is aware and ready for what the energy of the world puts in front of his eye and his camera. If only the human race was so aware.

Parr was a human being that I would have really liked to have met. To have a conversation about the energy of the world, the passion and commitment of human beings to do good things, to see things differently, to make a difference.

We have his images for as long as the human race exists. But I miss him already.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Ireland 1980-1983

While living in Ireland, Martin Parr became interested in the abandoned morris Minors – the emblematic car of the post-war British middle classes – found throughout the Irish countryside. Through his lens, the vehicles become a new motif of contemporary ruin: modern vanities symbolising the inevitable decline of progress, a subtle criticism of pollution linked to the automotive industry, an homage to the beauty of Irish landscapes, an almost optimistic meditation on the resilience of nature, and a celebration of human ingenuity. In this sense, the series offers an implicit history of both pollution and adaptation.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left the wall text “Leisure & Waste Lands” and at centre, Martin Parr’s Mar del Plata, Argentina (2014, below)

Leisure & Waste Lands

Beginning in the 1980s, Martin Parr relentlessly documented how contemporary landscapes are periodically or permanently reshaped by the expansion of mass leisure. Many of these works capture the coexistence and constant intermingling of natural and man-made elements.

Parr’s photography explores the interests of ordinary people, with whom he identified. Although he never learned to swim – unlike his wife Susie, who is an excellent swimmer – he spent a great deal of time on beaches, which feature prominently in his work. His first major colour series, ‘The Last Resort’, focuses on the popular seaside resort, New Brighton, near Liverpool. Parr would go on to pursue this theme across all five continents, producing some of his most incisive social critiques, from ‘Benidorm’ – capturing life at a sprawling resort on Spain’s Costa Blanca – to ‘Playas’ – a survey of Latin America’s most frequented beaches.

‘You can read a lot about a country by looking at its beaches: across cultures, the beach is that rare public space in which all absurdities and quirky national behaviour can be found,’ he wrote in 2013. For Parr, the beach setting became a field of experimentation, rarely appearing in his work as exotic or pristine, but instead as spaces rife with the contradictions of the leisure industry. At once convivial and chaotic, beaches are places of relaxation, paradoxically crowded with bodies, colours and – on might even say – noise. They are sites where we reproduce our ordinary urban habits, and where consumerism is inextricably bound up with trash and waste in every imaginable form: a highly photogenic subject that Parr faithfully captured from the very beginning of his career.

Wall text from the exhibition

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Mar del Plata, Argentina' 2014

‘I first came to Mar del Plata, the largest Argentine seaside resort, way back in 2007 when I was shooting images for my ‘Playas’ project, a survey of Latin American beaches. I was amazed then at the scale of the resort. It has two thousand hotels, sixteen kilometres of beaches, and welcomes over seven million visitors a year. In terms of scale, Mar del Plata dwarfs other well-known resorts across the globe, including Copacabana, Blackpool and benidorm, yet it is virtually unknown beyond Argentina.’

From Martin parr’s blog, Mar del Pata, 2004
Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s New Brighton, United Kingdom (1983-85, below); and at second left, Benidorm, Spain (1997)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s Tokyo, Japan (2000, below); at second left, Melbourne, Australia (2008); and at right, New Brighton, United Kingdom (1983-85, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Tokyo, Japan' 2000

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, United Kingdom
1983-85
From Last Resort
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s photograph New Brighton, United Kingdom (1983-85, below); at at right, Mar del Plata, Argentina (2014)

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'New Brighton, England' 1983-1985 from the series 'The Last Resort'

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, United Kingdom
1983-85
From Last Resort
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Spending Time, Salford, England' 1986

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at right, Martin Parr’s photograph Untitled (Hot Dog Stand), United Kingdom (1983-85, below) from Last Resort

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
Untitled (Hot Dog Stand), United Kingdom
1983-85
From Last Resort
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Installation view of the exhibition 'Martin Parr: Global Warning' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January - May, 2026 showing from left to right, 'Benidorm, Spain' (1997); 'Magaluf, Majorca, Spain' (2003); 'Benidorm, Spain' (1997); and at right, 'Tenby, United Kingdom' (2018)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warming at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing from left to right, Benidorm, Spain (1997); Magaluf, Majorca, Spain (2003); Benidorm, Spain (1997); and at right, Tenby, United Kingdom (2018)

Installation view of the exhibition 'Martin Parr: Global Warning' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January - May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr's 'Benidorm, Spain' (1997) and at right, 'Tenby, United Kingdom' (2018)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warming at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s Benidorm, Spain (1997, below) and at right, Tenby, United Kingdom (2018)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) Benidorm, Spain' 1997

This exhibition invites the public to revisit the work of Martin Parr. Through different bodies of work created from the late 1970s to the present day, Parr’s photographs capture the absurdities and malfunctions of our contemporary world. Over 50 years, in locations all round the globe, the photographer has built up a corpus of work that portrays the inequalities and excesses of our modern lifestyle. A number of themes recur throughout. These include: the ravages of tourism, the prevalence of car culture, our dependence on technology, consumer excess, and even our ambivalent relationship with the living world. Martin Parr brings his unique, off-beat perspective to several major causes of climate change and environmental damage: unchecked global travel, reliance on fossil fuels, and world-wide overconsumption. Seemingly light-hearted and humorous, Parr’s work is in fact deeply serious. The ironical nature of his work places Parr firmly within the traditions of British satire and offers an indirect yet profound critique of contemporary life.

Through some 180 images spanning fifty years of work – from his early black
and white images to more recent output – this exhibition addresses the chaos of modern society. Five main sections, organised according to recurring themes, motifs and obsessions, convey the range and depth of Parr’s work. These sections explore the way in which our leisure pursuits impact the environment. Despite being a non-swimmer, Parr is repeatedly drawn to the beach as a site where the natural and artificial worlds coexist and pleasure leads to waste. In the section ‘Everything Must Go!’ our obsessive consumerism is explored. Parr draws up a crude inventory of sought-after objects and modes of consumption. Supermarkets, shopping malls, fairs and exhibitions provide the setting for a frantic materialistic race that is common to all classes of society. Sometimes even human beings become a form of merchandise.

In the ‘Small World’ section, named after one of his most celebrated series, Parr explores the joys, contradictions and dead ends of the tourism industry. In some of the world’s most iconic destinations, he focuses on the habits, behaviours, expectations and disappointments of the global tourist, against the backdrop of North/South, West/East imbalances. In ‘The Animal Kingdom’ he looks at the ambiguous relationship between humans and animals, from fascination and indulgence to neglect and exploitation. The final section – ‘Technological Addictions’ addresses our relationship with machines of all kinds: phones, cars, planes and computers as through them we navigate space, time and reality on a daily basis.

I create entertainment that contains a serious message if you are willing to look for it, but I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m simply showing people what they think they know’ declared Martin Parr in 2021. Tireless photographer, frequent flyer, beach-lover, Martin Parr never tries to be a moral authority. He has often acknowledged that he himself is fully part of the world he documents and is clear-sighted about the environmental impact of his own lifestyle, particularly his significant carbon footprint: ‘We are heading towards catastrophe but we are all going there together. Who would dare ban cars or air travel?’

Aware that images alone are not enough to change the world, he advocates a form of discreet activism, a subtle visual guerilla warfare. If Parr uses humour it is always in the service of a commentary, often critical and satirical, that seeks to de-stabilise the idealised visions conveyed in the media by the cultural and tourism industries. Many of his images play with cliches, highlighting their inherent absurdity in order to subvert and deconstruct them. Tourist postcards, wildlife photography, foodie habits, selfies, all these and more provide the material that enables him to question, critique and occasionally mock the lifestyles and imagination of large sections of the world population. This exhibition is indeed a global warning.

Press release from Jeu de Paume

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s Moscow (1992) ; and at right, the wall text to “Last chance to buy”

Last chance to buy

Beginning in the 1980s, Martin Parr began documenting a subject that relatively few photographers were exploring at the time: the myriad dimensions of consumer culture in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, and in particular the tastes, aspirations and attitudes of the middle class. Parr would sustain this interest throughout his career, later extending his investigation across Europe and the United Sates as well as to countries in Asia and the Middle East shaped by Westernised or Americanised lifestyles.

Today, Parr’s work offers a blunt and often humorous inventory of our consumer goods and ways of life – from food and art to luxury items and useless trinkets – framing consumption as a kind of new religion. In several series, parr deliberately subverted the visual vocabulary of advertising photography. In ‘Common Sense’, one of his most incisive critiques of consumer culture, close-ups and saturated colours produce a grotesque caricature of a world dominated by kitsch. Through his lens, supermarkets, hypermarkets, shopping malls, fairs, and trade shows become stages on which all social classes take part in a frenzied and absurd rush to accumulate goods of every kind. In this world, which seems ultimately to offer little pleasure, human beings themselves are at times turned into commodities.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at centre, photographs from Martin Parr’s series Common Sense (1999)

Installation view of the exhibition 'Martin Parr: Global Warning' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January - May, 2026 showing photographs from Martin Parr's series 'Common Sense' (1999)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) From 'Common Sense ' 1999

Installation views of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing photographs from Martin Parr’s series Common Sense (1999, below)

In his playfully titled Common sense series, British photographer Martin Parr confronts and amuses us in a similar way. Each image in the series is an isolated detail revealing one ghastly aspect of excessive consumerism and consumption after another. The images jostle for our attention like billboards on the side of a freeway, employing many of the tactics of advertising, using large-scale, saturated colour and shock value to attract our gaze.

In his photographs of food, Martin Parr pointedly examines the gross indulgence that is encouraged by manufacturers and their advertisers. Shown here as just another commodity, generic and mass-produced food becomes obscene in its abundance…. When seen in such lurid detail, the overblown details on the person’s hands, such as the ring with blue stone, a Band-Aid, and the imperfect application of the gaudy nail polish, become repulsive images of the ordinary. …

The Common sense series is a major body of work within Parr’s ongoing exploration of globalisation, mass tourism, class culture and consumerism. In common with much of his work, this series presents images critical of the contemporary culture with a distinctive sense of irony and British humour. There is something uncomfortable in all these photographs. We laugh at them while being slightly embarrassed by their familiarity and are acutely aware of the gulf between a dream of glamour and the sad synthetic reality.

Susan van Wyk, Curator, Photography, National Gallery of Victoria

Susan van Wyk. “Martin Parr’s Common Sense,” in Art Journal 46, 29 Jan 14 on the National Gallery of Victoria website [Online] Cited 16/04/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995' 1994-1995 from the series 'British Food'

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995
1994-1995
From Common Sense
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'Ramsgate, England' 1996

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Tokyo, Japan' 1998

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Zurich, Switzerland' 1997

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
Fairy Cakes, Glasgow, Scotland
1999
From Common Sense
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Florida, USA' 1998

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s Cozumel, Mexico (2002, below); and at right, the wall text for “Small World”

Small World

Martin Parr maintained that he belonged fully to the world he documented and critiqued. He readily acknowledged the environmental impact of his own lifestyle – not least his substantial carbon footprint – and near positioned himself above his subjects. Although fully aware that images alone could never change the world, he nevertheless engaged in a form of subtle, visual guerrilla warfare that questioned dominant representations, particularly those promoted by the tourism industry.

Beginning in the 1990s, tourism emerged as one of his favourite subjects. He would explore it the world over, in all its pleasures, contradictions, and even dead ends, documenting the rituals and behaviours of the global tourist in the world’s most visited destinations. The sameness of gestures, attitudes and clothing encountered in every corner of the planet provides a humorous, slightly wistful counterpoint to the diversity of the sites and monuments photographed. Parr takes particular pleasure in overturning the codes of postcard perfect aesthetics, especially in his images of iconic landmarks, which he presents in degraded forms caught between over crowding, scenes of anxiety, and crude replicas. Through his lens, the quest for authenticity is a thing of the past.

Wall text from the exhibition

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Cozumel, Mexico' 2002

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Amer Fort, Jaipur, India' 2019

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing Parr’s photograph Cannes, France (2018, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Cannes, France' 2018

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Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s photograph Sorrento, Italy (2014, below); and at right, The Matterhorn, Alps, Switzerland (1990)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Sorrento, Italy' 2014

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'The Artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome' 1996

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
The Artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome, Seagaia Ocean Dome, Miyazaki, Japan
1996
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Machu Picchu, Peru' 2008

‘Between the hours of 10am and 2pm the site is at its busiest with up to 4,000 visitors arriving each day. Knowing how inaccessible the place is, it is staggering where and how they emerge. It is also not a cheap visit as each foreign tourist has to pay 122 soies (roughly $40) to enter the site. I am convinced that this entrance payment, together with the cost of the journey and the trekking are probably keeping the Peruvian economy afloat, as 70% of all visitors are foreigners.’

From Martin Parr’s blog, Machu Picchu, 2008
Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at bottom left, Martin Parr’s photograph Notre Dame, Paris, France (2012, below); and at right, Kleine Scheidegg, Switzerland (1994, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Notre Dame, Paris, France' 2012

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Kleine Scheidegg, Switzerland' 1994

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Ooty, India' 2018

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Musée du Louvre, Paris, France' 2012

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Las Vegas, USA' 2000

The Animal Kingdom

Installation view of the exhibition 'Martin Parr: Global Warning' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January - May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr's 'West Midlands Safari Park, United Kingdom' (1990); and at right, 'Longleat Safari Park, United Kingdom' (1994)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warming at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s West Midlands Safari Park, United Kingdom (1990); and at right, Longleat Safari Park, United Kingdom (1994)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'West Midlands Safari Park, United Kingdom' 1990

Unlike zoos, safari parks are designed to let animals roam freely, almost as if they were “in the wild”, while human visitors are meant to experience a sense of closeness to the animals natural state. In his images of safari parks, Martin Parr mocks this idea by deliberately including exactly what such photographs usually try to exclude: cars. The resulting images resemble absurd collages of two disjointed realities, in which – in typical Par-like fashion – he plays with the incongruous encounter between the natural world and a human-made, artificial dimension

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warming at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at second left, Martin Parr’s photograph Snow Polo World Cup, St Moritz, Switzerland (2011, below) from the series Luxury; and at second right, Venice Beach, California, USA (1998, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Snow Polo World Cup, St Moritz, Switzerland' 1998

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Venice Beach, California, USA' 1998

“I am not saying that tourism is bad – far from it as it brings a livelihood for many people. Organisations like Tourism Concern in the UK make a very important contribution to a better understanding of the yin and yang of tourism. This charity highlights the problems caused by tourism – from water shortages in newly developed sites to the pure rape of our ever decreasing natural habitats – and tries to ensure that local people benefit from the fruits of tourism. We need to adopt a better understanding of the issues surrounding this huge business. These photographs, I hope, will offer a good starting point. For remember we, in the wealthy West, are the ones that seek out the pleasures of tourism, so we’re all in this together.”

Martin Parr

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Lake Garda, Italy' 1999

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Venice, Italy' 2005

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing the wall text “Technological Addictions” with at bottom left, Martin Parr’s Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai, India (2018, below); at second right, Great Dorset Steam Fair, Dorset, England (2022, below) and at right, New York, USA (1999, below)

Technological Addictions

Even in his exploration of technology, Parr remains a humanist in both his practice and overarching project: what interests him is our relationship to the technology rather than the object or machine itself. As a keen observer of behaviour and constantly on the lookout for unexplored for unexplored topics, Parr examined how the human body interacts differently with each new technological object. He also probes technology’s growing role in daily lives and imagination, and the dependency it engenders. At the same time, he implicitly explores the way technology profoundly alters our perception of reality and our relationship to space and time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai, India' 2018

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s Great Dorset Steam Fair, Dorset, England (2022, below); and at top right, England, United Kingdom (1994) and at bottom right, England, United Kingdom (1994)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing Martin Parr’s Great Dorset Steam Fair, Dorset, England (2022, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Great Dorset Steam Fair, Dorset, England' 2022

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s New York, USA (1999, below); and at right top, Salford, United Kingdom (1986) and right bottom, Dublin, Ireland (1986)

‘I was hanging around a petrol station like a pervert. Photographers at the time would have said that this was the craziest place to take a picture. Because it’s a very unglamorous subject matter. Boring. There’s no drama here. But there’s something really interesting about boring. Something that seems very ordinary at the time becomes interesting when you look back at it later, almost 40 years later: the pump has changed, the clothes have changed, the car has changed. It tells us something about consumerism, and how we depend on fuel, oil and petrol.

From Martin Parr’s interview, ‘”There’s something very interesting about boring” Martin Parr on his life in pictures.’ The Guardian, 24 August 2025
Wall text from the exhibition

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'New York, USA' 1999

Photograph from Martin Parr’s first-ever fashion commission for the Italian magazine Amiga

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025) 'Venice, Italy' 2015 (installation view)

‘Although many museums have now banned the selfie stick, outside in the street, especially in front of that iconic monument or landmark the stick comes into its own. Getting the photo of you and your loved one(s) with the landmark in the background is de rigueur. The tourism industry, which is the biggest in the world, now dictates that the first requirement of any trip is to prove you were there with the necessary photo. It connects you to the world that we know and understand, and it is a vital part of any successful holiday experience. We used to have to ask a passing tourist to take the photo, but thanks to the selfie stick those days are over and we are now self sufficient.’

From Martin Parr’s blog, The Selfie Stick, 2015
Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at left, Martin Parr’s photographs Advertisement for Sony PlayStation, England, United Kingdom (2003); and at right, Ooty, India (2018, above)

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Parr: Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, January – May, 2026 showing at right, Martin Parr’s photograph from The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (2016, below)

Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)
The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
2016
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

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Exhibition: ‘FAKE! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages’ at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 6th February – 25th May, 2026

Curator: Hans Rooseboom, Curator of Photography at the Rijksmuseum

W.H. Martin (American, 1865-1940) (photographer) The North American Post Card Co. (publisher) 'The largest ear of corn grown' 1908 from the exhibition 'FAKE!' At the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February - May, 2026

W.H. Martin (American, 1865-1940)(photographer)
The North American Post Card Co. (publisher)
The largest ear of corn grown
1908
Postcard
Rijksmuseum
Purchase 2018

William H. “Dad” Martin of Ottawa, Kan., is considered to be the father of the exaggerated postcard. Some of his better work featured huge ears of corn, giant apples and peaches, stalks of wheat taller than any man and massive pumpkins uprooting a farmstead. Such cards were hugely successful throughout the Great Plains states where agriculture was the life’s blood of rural America.

W.H. Martin moved to Ottawa in 1899 to serve as an apprentice under photographer E.H. Corwin. Eight years later, Martin purchased Corwin’s studio and began crafting the tall tale postcards that would eventually make him a millionaire.

To fake or not to fake, that is the question…

Since the very inception of photography people have been making “fake” photographs. Indeed, one of the very first self-portraits ever taken, Hippolyte Bayard’s Le Noyé [The Drowned Man], made on October 18, 1840, is of the artist experimenting, using himself as a subject, posing himself in a fake suicide, expressing frustration “about his position in the photography world and about how little respect he felt he had been given in comparison to fellow photographer Louis Daguerre.”

There are many photographs pre digital manipulation that can be seen as “fake”1 but to me this is a disingenuous word, a sensationalist word, to describe photographs that basically undermine the photograph and its link to truth, the link of the photograph to the indexicality of its referent. But what is “truth” in a photograph?

Photographs have always deceived,2 depending on where you place the camera, which point of view you decide to capture and which to exclude, and when you decide to press the shutter … or what collage of photographs you put together and in what order. Thus, from one point of view, there is no such thing as a fake photograph, just different versions of (de)constructed realities.

Conversely you could argue that ALL photographs are “fake” as the photograph is only, can only ever be, a symbolic representation of a reality that never existed in the first place (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”).

Photographs are tricky little things.

In the case of this exhibition, early photo collages and photomontages are seen as “fake” only in terms of their relation to a certain version of a photographic reality. They are not fake in terms of the reality of their construction, produced in the IMAGINATION of the artist, expressed in the final image. In those terms they are as real as the surrealist interpretation of dreams, or cubist dissection of the image plane. And we don’t call those photographs or paintings “fake”.

Today, photography is delimited in terms of what a photograph can be. And it has been so since the very beginning of the medium if only we look hard enough. Dreams or nightmares, impossible, absurd or humorous scenes, believable and unbelievable: there is no such thing as genuine or fake – only the space between – expressed in pictorial compositions governed by the creativity and breadth of your imagination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ This exhibition adds to a previous exhibition on the subject titled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop staged at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 2012 – January 2013 and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, February – May, 2013

2/ “Fake” describes something not genuine, real, or authentic, intended to look like something else to deceive, cheat, or pretend.

.
Many thankx to the Rijksmuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“… photomontage is the fabrication of a composite but single image made up of a number of distinct photographic parts. It “results from the association of photographic elements, which have diverse origins, natures and proportions, combined in such a way as to express with force a particular idea.””

José Pierre, “Hannah Höch et le photomontage des Dadaists berhnois,” in Techniques Graphiques, no. 66 (November – December 1966), p. 352 quoted in Robert A. Sobieszek. “Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage, Part 1: The Naturalistic Strain,” in Artforum, Vol. 17, No. 1, September 1978 on the Artforum website [Online] Cited 18/02/2026

Installation view of the exhibition 'FAKE!' At the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Installation views of the exhibition FAKE! At the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February – May, 2026
Photos: Albertine Dijkema/Rijksmuseum

Leonard de Koningh (Dutch, 1810-1887)
Man startled by his own reflection
c. 1870-1880
Cartes de visite

In this comical memento mori, where a man comes face to face with his ghost, the painter and photographer Leonard de Koningh exposed just half of the photographic plate, then had the subject adopt a different pose before exposing the other half. Photography might have been a relatively new art, but the transition between the two images is imperceptible. “It’s like a magician,” marvels Rooseboom. “You know you are being tricked, but you don’t know how the photographer does it.” Quoting Oscar Gustave Rejlander, a trailblazer for this type of composite printing, the photographer Robert Sobieszek (1943-2005) stated: “This manner of working led not to falsehood but to truth. An image made by a single negative [claimed Rejlander] ‘is not true, nor will it ever be so – the focus cannot be everywhere’.”

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “‘Image manipulation has always been around’: 10 early photographic ‘fakes’ that trick the eye,” on the BBC website 18th February 2026 [Online] Cited 18/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Anonymous photographer
Daydream
c. 1870-1890
Cartes de visite

In this one we see the present: a woman and her partner both with the tools of their trades; and an imagined future: her daydream of becoming a mother. The image, explains Rooseboom, was “a darkroom trick”, achieved by shielding part of the photographic paper from the light and then adding a second negative to it later. Such images took photography into a new dimension, suggesting the innermost thoughts of their subjects, and paving the way for the comic strips of the future with their speech bubbles and thought clouds.

F.M. Hotchkiss (active 1870-1900)
Beheading
c. 1880-1900
Cabinet card
Purchase 2025

“We still expect photography to bring the truth, but this idea only really emerged from the illustrated magazines of the 1930s in order to inform readers how things worked elsewhere in the world,” says Rooseboom. Until then, the creative freedom to alter the image was unchallenged. “Anything possible would be tried out and produced,” he says. “There was no ethical restraint on producing non-realistic images. No-one would forbid you from doing this.” Removing and moving someone’s head, for example, presented the photographer with a pleasing puzzle. In the case of this cabinet card – a style of print mounted on card had taken over from the smaller carte de visite by the 1880s – with its black humour, the creative mission was highly successful. Only the positioning of the curtain, that would have concealed the original head, and some light retouching visible under a microscope, offer clues to how the photographer created the deception.

Anonymous photographer. 'Photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow containing a head' c. 1900 – c. 1910 from the exhibition 'FAKE!' At the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February - May, 2026

Anonymous photographer
Photomontage of a man pushing a wheelbarrow containing a head
c. 1900 – c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

This photomontage, created from two negatives, was found in a French photo album, and featured in the science magazine La Nature. Here, the displaced head illusion goes a step further as the photographer plays with scale, prefiguring the Surrealist movement which gathered pace as the century unrolled, disrupting conventional shapes and sizes to create confusing, dreamlike scenes. The open doorway provides a conveniently plain, dark background in which to smuggle in the cut-and-pasted portion before re-photographing the image as a whole. Some of these images were most likely purchased as portraits to show others, to see their look of surprise. “It’s hard to see where the trick starts and ends,” says Rooseboom. “This is showing off. Something is unbelievable, impossible, it’s improbable, but still it’s there in a photographic image which suggests we see a real scene that really unfolded in front of the camera.”

Almost immediately after the invention of the medium people began manipulating photographs – some with scissors and glue, others through ingenious photographic techniques. Drawing on more than 50 historical images from the museum’s own collection, the exhibition FAKE! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages, shows how image manipulation developed – from the birth of photography to the Second World War – and explores the motives behind it. The exhibition runs from 6 February to 25 May 2026 in the Photo Gallery of the Rijksmuseum.

“Many photo collages and composites depict impossible, absurd or humorous scenes that no one would have mistaken for reality. Yet even then, the boundary between genuine and fake, believable and unbelievable, was often hard to see.” ~ Hans Rooseboom, Curator of Photography

Cut and paste

The exhibition covers 1860-1940, a period when the possibilities of cutting and pasting photographs were widely explored. People also started experimenting with other methods of image manipulation. One trick that became popular shortly after the invention of photography was to show the same person twice in a single image: first, one half of the plate was exposed; then the subject would move, strike a different pose, and the other half of the plate was exposed. This technique was mostly used for harmless visual jokes, purely for entertainment, but the exhibition also shows how it was sometimes employed with very serious intent.

Political protest

Exaggeration, humour and incongruous visual combinations also played a major role in political protest. The best-known creator of political photo composites is John Heartfield (pseudonym of Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968), who opposed Hitler’s Nazi movement. Several examples of his work appear in the exhibition.

Press release from the Rijksmuseum

P. Michaelis (Berlin, publisher)
Man and woman with briefcase and three babies above Hamburg
c. 1900-1910
Postcard

Martin Post Card Company (American)
Taking our Geese to market
1908
Postcard
Rijksmuseum
Purchase 2019

The trend for playing with images of impossible proportions spawned a genre known as “Exaggerations” or “Tall Tales”. This US photograph was printed during the “Golden Age” of picture postcards, shortly after the US decreed that messages could be written on the address side of the card. We see again the pioneering role photo manipulation plays in artistic developments such as Surrealism, but the use of scale here is also a marketing ploy to create myths about the agricultural superiority of a region. In this case, it’s the celebrated stuffed geese of Watertown, Wisconsin. Elsewhere in the show, Nebraska boasts about its bountiful produce with an ear of corn the length of a horse-drawn carriage. As US author and folklorist Roger Welsch noted in Tall Tale Postcards (1976): “Photography brought into being visual effects that tall-tale tellers through the centuries had seen only in their fertile imaginations.”

William H. Martin, (1865 – c. 1940) also known by the nickname “Dad“, was an American photographer and postcard designer known for using photomontage to depict exaggerated scenes with out-of-scale plants and animals. His works featured fanciful depictions of the American frontier inspired by tall tales. His depictions of abundant crops and large livestock served to humorously parody the struggles of farmers in the Midwestern United States who faced drought. They also mocked the exaggerated promises of fertile land and abundant livestock that companies used to lure settlers to the West. Martin was a pioneer of the art form of collage in the United States, and is considered to be the “father” of the exaggeration postcard genre.

Martin was originally from Maple City, Kansas. and was born in 1865. When he was 21 years old, he moved to Ottawa, Kansas to study under the photographer E.H. Corwin. He had no prior experience in photography. He proved successful, and bought Corwin’s photography studio in 1894.

He used photomontage and trick photography and, in 1908, began producing wildly exaggerated postcards for commercial sale. His cards typically featured out-of-scale scenes with people alongside giant plants and animals, created by cutting and pasting together different photographs. His postcards were popular with Western settlers, who sent them back to their families in the Eastern United States. His business was successful, and by 1909 he had built a two-story business building behind his home and employed around 20 people, who produced around 10,000 postcards every day. His photographs proved so popular that they were often plagiarised by other postcard companies and sold under different names.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Theodor Eismann (publisher) (Leipzig, Germany)
Car flying over Mulberry Bend Park, New York
before 1908
Postcard
Rijksmuseum
Purchase 2025

Eismann established the company in Leipzig around 1884 and was instrumental in the pre-World War I postcard boom in Germany for the U.S. market. Theochrom was name given to the printing process used.

Fake photographs activated the imagination, presenting imagined possibilities yet to come. This example of a toekomstbeeld (vision of the future) envisages a world where cars could fly. Elsewhere in the exhibition we see futuristic cityscapes: town centres transformed by sky rails and zeppelins thanks to some deft copy and pasting, and skyborne visitors floating over Boston, Hamburg and The Hague in scenes reminiscent of Mary Poppins. Eismann’s New York photomontage [above] now features colour but is no more truthful, its limited range of inks added during the printing process at the whim of the designer.

Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr. (American, 1863-1932)
Collision between a car and a steamroller
1915
Tall-tales postcard (exaggerated postcard)
Waupun catalog no. P126

We’ve come to think of photo trickery as something sinister, but in his research on its use in early photography, Rooseboom says he was surprised to find that “three-quarters of all the images were made for fun”. In this photomontage by Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr, the clever placement of a series of individual − sometimes overlapping − images provides a humorous snapshot in time. The unusually dynamic, action-filled scene features flying coattails and frilly bloomers as the passengers of a car are catapulted through the air, inviting a before-and-after narrative in the mind of the viewer. “Many photomontages obviously depict impossible situations,” states a text at the exhibition. “The intention was not to mislead, but rather to entertain the viewer.”

Alfred and Elizabeth were living at 315 South Madison Street (in Dodge County) and their son Stanley – who was now going by his middle name – and wife Myrtie were living at 315 North Madison Street (in Fond du Lac County), with their son Alfred S. (the III), who was less than a year old. The Johnson photo studio/gallery was then located at 11-17 North Madison, just off Main Street. This was only a few years after Stanley began producing his tall-tale postcards, probably assisted by his wife, Myrtie, who was listed in the 1905 State Census as being a “photographer” and the 1910 Census as a “photo retoucher.” Although he apparently was known locally by the name of Stanley, he used the name “Alfred Stanley Johnson, Jr.” on most of his postcards.

Stanley Johnson, Sr. died December 3, 1914, and his wife Elizabeth died December 9, 1919; both are buried in the family plot in Forest Mound Cemetery in Waupun. Stanley continued in the photo business at 11 North Madison Street – while living at 17 N. Madison – until a few years before his death on March 1, 1932. His obituary in the Waupun Leader News stated that he had “been in poor health for about 30 years,” which would have been since about the time he started creating his exaggerated postcards. Perhaps the cards provided the extra income needed to pay ongoing medical bills.

Anonymous. “Johnson, Alfred Stanley,” on the Wisconsin Historical Society website Nd [Online] 18/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Elsie Wright (British, 1901-1988) and Frances Griffiths (British, 1907-1986)
Fairy Offering Flowers to Iris
1920
From the Cottingley Fairies series
Gelatin silver print

The Cottingley Fairies are the subject of a hoax which purports to provide evidence of the existence of fairies. They appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of supernatural phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked.

Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls married and lived abroad for a time after they grew up, and yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination. In 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the United Kingdom. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Albert Huyot (French, 1872-1968)
Photo collage
1929

The cutting up of images and rearranging them on paper with glue was once a popular pastime. People made celebrity photo quizzes, sometimes featuring just a nose or a pair of eyes; and the photographed faces of friends and family were superimposed onto drawings for comic effect. Photo collages were also undertaken by established artists. In this piece, which is influenced by Dadaism and Cubism, French artist Albert Huyot manipulates fragments of photographic images into surprising new artistic forms. More intricate photographic artworks can be seen in the show on the pages of the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy’s seminal book Painting, Photography, Film (1925). In it he argues that photography is not just about recording reality. Instead, it should explore the visual language unique to its medium.

The son and grandson of artists, Albert Huyot was a pupil of Diogène Maillart and Gustave Moreau. His first paintings were done in a generic Post-Impressionist manner indebted to the example of the Nabis, but he soon became influenced by Cubism. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries, and also participated in the Grande Exposition in Brussels in 1910; in the same year he also spent some time in Russia. Huyot was a friend of Henri Matisse, and around 1912 his work reveals the influence of Fauvism; André Derain was another particular influence. After 1920, however, Huyot seems to have abandoned the rigour of his earlier work in favour of landscape painting. An exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1926.

Text from the Stephen Ongpin Fine Art website

John Heartfield, pseudonym of Helmut Herzfeld (German, 1891-1968) Mimikry, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (A-I-Z), 19 April 1934
1934

Sometimes, in a surprising twist, photographic trickery was a tool for conveying a perceived truth. Anti-Nazi campaigner Helmut Herzfeld, who changed his name to the anglicised John Heartfield in protest against Hitler’s regime, created over 200 handcrafted political photomontages for the leftist AIZ publication, many seeking to expose the hidden dangers of the Nazi dictatorship and the lies it disseminated. Mimicry depicts Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, disguising Hitler as the 19th-Century revolutionary communist Karl Marx. The artist is warning the working classes not to be fooled by Hitler’s promises that he genuinely supports workers’ rights. Such work is comparable with political memes today that aim to speak truth to power. Image manipulation can both mislead us and help us find our way.

Rijksmuseum
Museumstraat 1
1071 XX Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Open daily 9 – 17h

Rijksmuseum website

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Exhibition dates: 9th March – 13th September, 2026

Exhibition overview

“How To See”: Black Mountain College, 1940s

Commercial Designs, early 1950s

“Everything is connected”: Forms within Forms, 1950s

“Vocabulary of My Sculpture”

The Tamarind Prints, 1965

Nature, Tied Wire and Later Sculpture, 1960s-1990s

Public Art and Public Commissions, 1960s-1990s

“Life Draws”: From the Garden, 1980s-2000s

Noe Valley, 1960s-2000s

“My Home was and is My Studio”

Catalogue

Career as a photographer

Exhibition dates: 19th April – 7th September, 2026

Exhibition credits

Exhibition dates: 23rd May – 23rd August, 2026

The rape of the earth

Environmental impacts of mining

Social impacts of mining

Photographing American Mining and Energy

Elizabeth Fortune

Daguerreotypes

Stereographs

Commissions and Surveys

Panoramas

Modernist Forms

Aerial Views

Portraits

Large-Scale Color Photographs

In the Library: Photobooks and American Energy

July 2026

Image and imagination

Apollo Theater

Lafayette Theatre

Savoy Dancers

About the Savoy Ballroom

Exhibition dates: 24th January – 28th June, 2026

Surrounded by mirrors

Embodiment is the fundamental condition we share.

Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body

About the exhibition

Surface Tension

Kinetic Beauty

Know Thyself

Enduring

June 2026

There is no time

Exhibition dates: 28th June, 2025 – 21st June, 2026

Silhouetting the celebrity

Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography Introductory text

Anna Maria Magnani (Italian, 1908-1973)

Exhibition dates: 20th June, 2025 – 7th June, 2026

High-class portraits

National Portrait Gallery Presents “From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years”

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 24th May, 2026

A bewitching eye / the unfolding moment

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Technological Addictions

Exhibition dates: 6th February – 25th May, 2026

To fake or not to fake, that is the question…

Cut and paste

Political protest