LE MONDE
| 05.12.07 | 16h11 • Mis à jour le 05.12.07 | 16h11
BAMAKO ENVOYÉE SPÉCIALE

© Sammy Baloji

Bamako, fin novembre, le petit studio du célèbre portraitiste Malick Sidibé désemplit pas. Pendant les Rencontres africaines de la photographie, principal festival de photo en Afrique, Européens et Américains font la queue pour poser pour le maître. Ce matin, le photographe, 71 ans, se fait attendre. Mais le voilà qui arrive, souriant, une valisette sous le bras. Il en sort une statuette étincelante, qu'il installe sur une table bien en vue : son Lion d'or, remporté à Venise.

En 2007, Malick Sidibé est la star de ces 7es Rencontres africaines, pilotées par le commissaire d'origine camerounaise, Simon Njami. Pendant un mois, la ville accueille en différents lieux une cinquantaine de photographes et une dizaine de vidéastes d'Afrique et de la diaspora. Au Musée national, l'exposition principale donne de l'Afrique une vision colorée et picturale, rarement politique. Dans cette sélection inégale, les textes explicatifs se font rares. Les autoportraits drôles et grinçants de Samuel Fosso, de République centrafricaine, dominent l'ensemble. L'artiste revêt l'apparence de ses contemporains pour moquer leurs travers : de la femme moderne faussement "libérée" à ce chef "qui a vendu l'Afrique aux colons". Les photographes sud-africains, de Jodi Bieber à Lolo Veleko, démontrent aussi leur vitalité.

En quatorze ans d'existence, le festival financé par la France (via l'opérateur CulturesFrance) et par l'Union européenne (au total environ 850 000 euros) a contribué à révéler les deux stars maliennes de la photographie, Seydou Keita (1921-2001) et Malick Sidibé. Encore aujourd'hui, pour les Maliens sélectionnés, la biennale est synonyme de voyages, d'ouverture et de rencontres. Mamadou Konaté, sélectionné quatre fois à la biennale, récapitule : "J'ai été exposé en Finlande, à Barcelone... Surtout, le festival nous a appris à regarder les images." Le jeune Mohamed Camara se voyait plutôt un avenir dans le football. Il est aujourd'hui l'un des rares photographes bamakois à vivre de son art. Le festival ne suscite pourtant pas l'enthousiasme du public. Les musées sont peu fréquentés, sauf par quelques élites et les expatriés. Quant à la photo, à part celle pratiquée dans les studios en ville, elle n'est pas très populaire. "La plupart des Maliens ne voient pas la photo comme un art", explique Mohamed Camara.

DES "PORTRAITS DÉCALÉS"

Pour élargir son audience, le festival a misé sur un nouveau lieu, immense et décalé, le Hangar. Cet ancien entrepôt de matériel agricole abrite le projet d'une association de femmes maliennes, Cultur'elles : des expositions en marge de la sélection officielle et une grande fête en l'honneur de Malick Sidibé. La France aimerait pérenniser le lieu. "L'endroit est intéressant car il est convivial, note Mantchini Traoré, présidente de l'association. Mais on a surtout besoin d'initiatives en direction du public. S'il ne se déplace pas, il faut aller à lui."

Plusieurs photographes regrettent les expositions dans la rue qui ne sont plus à l'ordre du jour. Seuls l'association Tendance floue et le Cinéma numérique ambulant (CNA) plongent au coeur des quartiers en proposant des "portraits décalés". Les passants se font tirer le portrait devant un fond numérique qui va des taxis new-yorkais à la galerie des Glaces de Versailles. Le résultat, très exotique, est projeté sur écran, et provoque l'hilarité générale.

A Bamako, quand la biennale ferme ses portes, les photographes se sentent seuls, sans lieu pour exposer. La seule galerie photo de Bamako périclite et la Maison africaine de la photographie, créée en 2006, n'a pas encore de siège. Pour survivre, les artistes doivent couvrir les mariages ou les baptêmes.

Depuis 1998, un centre de formation à la photographie tente de promouvoir cette profession, à coups de stages et de résidences. Douze étudiants y passent chaque année, mais les financements se font rares. Le directeur, le photographe Youssouf Sogodogo, forme ses élèves au tirage numérique et au travail de laboratoire. En espérant qu'un jour les tirages de la biennale soient réalisés à Bamako et non plus en Europe.

Afrik.com

Cultures France

Le photographe Malick Sidibé a recu un Lion d'Or pour l'ensemble de sa carrière. Ce prix lui a été décérné à la Biennale d'art contemporain de Venise.

Malick Sidibé s'inscrit dans la plus pure tradition des portraitistes africains. Il ne compte plus les voisins et voisines venus poser devant son objectif. Tous viennent y chercher la Sidibé-touch: ce regard et la complicité qui unit le photographe à ses modèles. Malick Sidibé est attaché à sa ville, à son pays. Il a accompli tout un travail de reportage, notamment sur la jeunesse malienne à l'époque de l'indépendance dans les années 1960 : les fêtes, l'arrivée du disque, les yéyés... d'autres images du continent noir.

Début des années 90, il attire le regard d'André Magnin, un grand collectionneur d'art africain. Ce dernier va promouvoir son travail. Avec les premières Rencontres internationales de Bamako en 1994, Malick Sidibé commence à se faire un nom en Afrique. Puis il expose, aux Etats-Unis, au Japon et en Europe, où il est aussi invité en résidence. Avec à la clé de nouvelles séries de portraits si spécifiques... Rien d'étonnant donc à ce qu'il ramène un lion en Afrique.

Voir le reportage

© Richard Prince Untitled (Upstate), 1995-99 Ektacolor photograph, 40 x 60 inches

This critical overview of Richard Prince's career is the most comprehensive examination of the celebrated American artist's work to date. The exhibition highlights Prince's contributions to the development of contemporary art, bringing together key examples of his photographs, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in an installation that integrates the various series comprising his oeuvre.

Prince's work has been among the most innovative art produced in the United States during the past 30 years. His deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince's technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction. While previous examinations of his art have emphasized its central role as a catalyst for postmodernist criticism, the Guggenheim exhibition and its accompanying catalogue also focus on the work's iconography and how it registers prevalent themes in our social landscape, including a fascination with rebellion, an obsession with fame, and a preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit.

Organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, in close collaboration with the artist.

Show ends the 9th of January Guggenheim Museum, NY

LE MONDE | 20.12.07 | 16h37 • Mis à jour le 20.12.07 | 16h37 | Emmanuelle Lequeux

C'est d'abord l'histoire d'un meurtre que raconte l'exposition de la Hayward Gallery, à Londres : celui de la peinture figurative par la photographie. Dans les années 1910, l'avis de décès est définitif. Les visages, les silhouettes, les paysages reconnaissables sont pour la photographie. La peinture cherche une nouvelle voie dans l'abstraction. Jusqu'à ce que les années 1960 rouvrent le procès. Pionniers du dialogue entre médiums, l'Allemand Gerhard Richter et l'Américain Andy Warhol ne luttent plus : la photographie inspire leur retour à la figuration.

La remarquable exposition "Peintres de la vie moderne" retrace des années 1960 jusqu'à nos jours l'histoire de ce dialogue renoué à travers environ 80 tableaux réalisés par 22 artistes. Car l'exposition évite intelligemment la confrontation directe : les peintures sont au mur alors que les photos déclencheuses d'inspiration sont reproduites dans la brochure d'aide à la visite. Mises à distance, elles deviennent source lointaine, que chacun utilise à sa manière, faisant jaillir tableaux réalistes (parfois des images travaillées) ou expressionnistes.

Le titre de l'exposition est tiré d'un essai de Baudelaire qui exhortait les peintres à témoigner de la trivialité et de la vitalité du contemporain. Il résume le parti pris des résistants à l'abstraction : les toiles de Richter et de Warhol se laissent envahir par les détails du monde - fêtes glauques, conflits armés, travestis, infirmières...

Piochant dans les médias, l'Anglais Richard Hamilton fige un Mick Jagger menotté. La star du marché, l'Ecossais Peter Doig, mixe des photos de vacances pour recomposer un paysage pictural. Quand il mime d'un pinceau superbement illusionniste les images des brochures d'agences de voyages, l'Américain Malcolm Morley dessine une croisière dans une insouciance middle-class des années 1970. Dans ses sérigraphies, Andy Warhol détourne des images d'accidents de voiture ou de chaise électrique pour faire ressurgir les traumatismes de la société consumériste.

La photo est documentation pour les uns, questionnement de la réalité pour les autres. Non pas un modèle à recopier, mais le révélateur d'un monde. "Pour moi, la photographie est plus pertinente que l'histoire de l'art, analyse Richter. C'est une image de ma, de notre réalité actuelle. Et je ne la considère pas comme un substitut pour la réalité, mais comme une manière de m'aider à saisir cette réalité." Les silhouettes peintes par Richter d'après des clichés amateur se fondent dans la toile, semblent l'objet d'une lutte : entre un être qui voudrait émerger et une surface qui lui résiste.

C'est le beau paradoxe de cette exposition : bien qu'inspirés par la photographie, beaucoup des peintres relèguent la réalité à l'arrière-plan. Ce sont les préoccupations picturales qui occupent le devant de leurs scènes. Ainsi des personnages dépeints par le Suisse Franz Gertsch : avec leurs gestes suspendus, leur ombre violemment projetée par le flash, ces magnifiques stéréotypes 1970 rayonnent d'une présence troublante. Et pourtant ils incarnent un mystère : celui de l'émergence de l'image. "J'ai pensé qu'à travers le medium photographique je pourrais renoncer à toute responsabilité sur les choses que je dépeignais, comme si soudain j'arrivais sur terre en provenance d'une autre planète, sans connaître des choses autour de moi rien de plus que ce que j'étais capable de percevoir d'une manière purement visuelle", explique l'artiste. Inspirées par le conflit afghan, les toiles de la Sud-Africaine Marlene Dumas explorent surtout la question de l'invasion du monde par les images. Révélation de cette exposition, le jeune Polonais Wilhem Sasnal navigue sur les mêmes eaux : violentes comme une gravure sur bois, graphiques comme un logo dans le contraste du noir et blanc, ses toiles montrent combien le dialogue ne s'épuise pas.

"The Painting of Modern Life", Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, Londres. Tél. : 00-44- 871-663-25-01. Tous les jours de 10 heures à 18 heures ; mardi et mercredi jusqu'à 20 heures. 8 £. Jusqu'au 30 décembre.
Catalogue, 196 p, 37 €. L'exposition sera présentée au Castello di Rivoli, près de Turin, du 4 février au 4 mai.

The Hayward

The first major museum survey of its kind, The Painting of Modern Life re-examines what has been arguably the most influential development in the history of contemporary painting: the use and translation of photographic imagery. Curated by The Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff, the exhibition charts the international evolution of this tendency over the past 45 years, including seminal photo-inspired works from the early 1960s by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Revealing the surprising stylistic diversity of this work, the exhibition also focuses on the great variety of subject matter from the personal to the political, addressed by featured artists.

'This is the rare show that can sustain an argument' (Daily Telegraph).

'This is a show that stimulates mind and eye' (Observer).

'the most interesting, intelligent, serious and enlivening display of contemporary art for a long time' The Independent

'this is that rare show that can sustain an argument..and that keeps you on your toes.' The Daily Telegraph

The Hayward dedicated minisite

Newsweek
By Peter Plagens | NEWSWEEK Dec 10, 2007 Issue

© Photo by Cindy Sherman

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions.
In Depth of Field— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978" (up through Dec. 31) celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect.

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form. Talbot wanted only to be able to "draw" more accurately than by hand. In fact, he called his first book of reproduced photographs The Pencil of Nature

For at least a century thereafter, any photograph with a claim to being art had in its DNA at least a few chromosomes from Talbot's The The Open Door a picture of a tree-branch broom leaning just-so-esthetically against a dark doorway. Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art." Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings.

Soon, photography escaped the exclusive grasp of the professionals and moneyed hobbyists who could afford its cumbersome equipment, and the public began to take its own pictures. In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. To be sure, some masterpieces did emerge—mostly accidentally—from this Everest-size heap of images. The person who pointed his Brownie at the woman in "Unknown [photographer], 1950s" in The Art of the American Snapshot probably didn't anticipate that she'd cover her face with her hands just as he clicked the shutter. And he (or she) couldn't predict that the result would be a great composition—long fingers and angular elbows set against the gentle downhill sweep of a field—and a wonderful metaphor for photography's tango with the truth. What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and '40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and '60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing.

In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. "The big change in attitude from realist photography," says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, "was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980." Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake "film stills" with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable.

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

Scott McFarland’s “Orchard View With the Effects of Seasons (Variation #1).” Mr. McFarland uses digital techniques to depict unsettling tableaus.

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Published: November 26, 2007

Bright letters announce “New Photography 2007” on a wall outside the Museum of Modern Art’s photography galleries. Just inside is a room of vintage-looking black-and-white photographs. Contemporary photographers are showing a strong interest in early photography, so your first thought is that the curator has unearthed someone recycling the ideas and methods of Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz or Clarence White.

Museum of Modern Art
“Grace in Window” by Tanyth Berkeley; her art is said to challenge stereotypes of female beauty.

Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
A detail of Berni Searle’s “Approach,” which is made up of seven prints.
But no. These are pictures by Muybridge, Stieglitz and White. Keep walking; the annual showcase of emerging photographers is in the next room. After that accidental spark of excitement, though, the show itself is something of a letdown.

“New Photography” is generally limited to three or four artists, which puts pressure on the chosen few to deliver something fresh. None of this year’s photographers accomplish that. The one who comes the closest is Tanyth Berkeley, who lives in New York, has shown in Chelsea and was included in the 2005 edition of P.S. 1’s “Greater New York.”

Ms. Berkeley is from the Diane Arbus school: Her work involves a lot of social engineering. She identifies people on the street or subway, and over a period of time coaxes them into posing. (Arbus used urban parks as her hunting grounds.) Ms. Berkeley’s art is often described as showcasing odd beauty or challenging stereotypes of female beauty.

“Grace in Window” features one of her favorite subjects, a woman who is either an albino or close to it. Posed with her eyes closed before a light-filled window, her eyelashes barely register. She looks like an ethereal alien.

Ms. Berkeley’s full-length portraits are more complicated. Here the approach that got Arbus in trouble — exposing differences, which led to accusations of exploitation — raises the same issues. Her photographs of transgendered people completely abandon Arbus’s carefully constructed empathy for the subject. Gazing becomes staring, possibly at pathology, given the people’s extreme thinness and their evident fondness for surgical procedures.

Scott McFarland, who lives in Vancouver, uses digital techniques to create crystalline color photographs that depict unsettling tableaus and suggest uncanny narratives. Sound familiar?

Earlier this year MoMA mounted a retrospective of Jeff Wall, the master of the digitally enhanced (or fabricated) faux-narrative photograph and one of Vancouver’s most famous artists. Mr. McFarland’s picture of a young family watching a keeper feed porcupines at the Berlin Zoo could be a Wall from around 1989 or a student facsimile. (It’s no surprise, then, to discover that Mr. McFarland once worked as Mr. Wall’s assistant.)

Mr. McFarland’s photographs of nature controlled by human beings — an orchard digitally manipulated to present all four seasons at once or a series merging different areas in a botanical garden — recall Thomas Struth. Mr. McFarland’s aesthetic and techniques feel overly familiar and dated.

Serialization, a hallmark of late-20th-century art, is Berni Searle’s focus. Ms. Searle, who lives in Cape Town, has photographed herself climbing up and down giant mounds of grape skins discarded after a vineyard harvest, and then joined the images in a long horizontal frieze. Another series uses crepe-paper silhouettes traced from family photographs and immersed in water as repeating motifs.

Ms. Searle is good at creating visual effects: the rhythm of the rising and falling grape-skin mounds; the sandstorm look of the crepe-paper silhouettes in water. But her conceptual basis feels weak, particularly when it is spelled out in hackneyed wall texts.

A consistently strong point of the “New Photography” series, including this edition, has been the international array of artists. But so far it has been weak in showcasing new developments and contextualizing contemporary photography within the collection, which helps explain the jarring transition from Stieglitz & Company to the current crop. You hate to be the spoiler, the insatiable art viewer constantly demanding that rush of something new. But when a show is called “New Photography 2007,” you feel within your rights.

“New Photography 2007: Tanyth Berkeley, Scott McFarland, Berni Searle” is on view through Jan. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

A display from the 2005 show “Diane Arbus Revelations” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 18, 2007

Two years ago gallerygoers had a chance to discover the personal side of Diane Arbus in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the portraits that made her famous — powerfully unsettling photographs of dwarfs, transvestites and everyday people — the Met filled librarylike rooms with her photographic equipment, pages from her diaries, books from her home and studio and family pictures.

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life — her complete archives — to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971.

At the same time, the museum has bought 20 of Arbus’s most important photographs, including “Russian Midget Friends in a Living Room on 100th Street, N.Y.C.” from 1963 and “Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C.” from 1968, from the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, which represents her estate. While the Met declined to say what it paid for the photographs, experts say they are worth at least $5 million. The gift of the archive is impossible to value, experts said.

Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in the Met’s department of photographs, predicted that the archive would be an enormous boon to scholars. “Generally this kind of material doesn’t survive the artist,” he said.

Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus’s effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography. (After her death her daughters, Amy and Doon, looked after their mother’s estate.

Born into a wealthy family in New York, she married Allan Arbus when she was 18. The two ran a fashion photography business until 1959, when they began working on independent projects, many of which eventually found their way into magazines like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar.

What makes her portraits so unusual and so popular, as she once said, is that “nothing is ever what it seems.” She photographed subjects from nudists and freaks and carnival performers to just plain faces on the street that compelled or intrigued her.

“These pictures ask more questions than they answer,” Mr. Rosenheim said. “When you look at them, you almost feel as though you are having an interaction with the subject and the picture maker simultaneously. You are in a place where there is a lot of intimacy being shared.”

Unlike many photographers with whom she overlapped, like Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank, Arbus would often meet a subject and form a long relationship, the diaries and date books show. It could take 10 years for her to produce her best photographs of that subject.

“Most of the artists of the period who photographed their subjects did not know them at all and did not wish to know them,” Mr. Rosenheim said. “But Arbus worked so differently — she was a medium for a lot of people.” He cited the famous 1970 portrait of Eddie Carmel, a performer who was known over the years as the “World’s Biggest Cowboy” and later the Jewish giant. “That picture took 10 years to gestate,” Mr. Rosenheim said.

Arbus was also very much a New York artist: Many of her subjects were people she had met in Central Park. “It couldn’t be closer to home,” Mr. Rosenheim said of the Met, a stone’s throw from her old haunts.

For years the museum has pushed to expand its modern photography holdings. In 1994 it captured the archive of Walker Evans, including some 30,000 black-and-white negatives, 10,000 color transparencies, motion picture film from the late 1920s to the 1970s, original manuscripts, diaries, recordings of interviews and lectures and his personal library.

That archive also included ephemera like road signs and driftwood that Evans collected on walks on the beach near his Connecticut home toward the end of his life, when he was too infirm to hold a camera. “He also had an enormous correspondence and volumes of writings,” Mr. Rosenheim said. “But his life was much longer than Arbus’s.”

Mr. Rosenheim said it took six years to catalog, conserve and make sense of the Evans archive. Even though he was one of the curators who helped organize “Diane Arbus Revelations,” the traveling exhibition that stopped at the Met in 2005, he said he had not really had the chance to “dig deep” into her archival material, which starts in 1923.

His ultimate goal, he said, was “to present in an unfettered way the direct material from which Arbus created her work.” Once the materials are cataloged, scholars will be able to have access to them.

“I need time to sit there with these volumes,” Mr. Rosenheim said.

From the collection of Robert E. Jackson.

National Gallery of Art, Washington

This exhibition of approximately 200 snapshot photographs chronicles the evolution of snapshot photography from 1888, when George Eastman first introduced the Kodak camera and roll film, through the 1970s. During this time it became possible for anyone to be a photographer, and snapshots not only had a profound impact on American life and memory, but they also influenced fine art photography. Organized chronologically, the exhibition focuses on the changes in culture and technology that enabled and determined the look of snapshots. It examines the influence of popular imagery, as well as the use of recurring poses, viewpoints, framing, camera tricks, and subject matter, noting how they shift over time. By presenting the history of snapshot photography instead of concentrating on thematic subject matter, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue mark a new approach to the genre. The exhibition is drawn from the collection of Robert E. Jackson and from recent gifts Mr. Jackson made to the National Gallery of Art.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 7–December 31, 2007; Amon Carter Museum, February 16–April 27, 2008

Sponsor: The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Trellis Fund and The Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

© Rodney Graham (Canadian, born 1949). Welsh Oaks #1, 1998. Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002 (2002.381)

"Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan" draws on the Museum’s rapidly expanding collection of photography since 1960, a time when the camera first played an instrumental role in breaking down the previously well-maintained boundaries between media. The photographic image—mechanically produced, endlessly reproducible, and found in every corner of the culture—was of central importance in the dismantling of age-old hierarchies, challenging notions of authorship and originality, and radically redefining what constituted an artist and a work of art in postwar society. A painting by Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol could be a coolly distanced grisaille of a snapshot or a silkscreen grid of grisly tabloid outtakes, while the traditional work of sculpture was displaced in two diametrically opposed directions: toward the artist’s body as subject, object, and implicit point of reference, and outward to anti-monumental, site-specific interventions into the landscape, both of which were dependent on the photograph to extend the life of the artist’s fleeting gestures.

Photography by artists who were not trained photographers in turn freed the medium from some of its own timeworn clichés of expressivity. The photograph in series—deliberately pokerfaced studies of snow melting off a tree branch by Douglas Huebler or of differently shaped water towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher seen in this exhibition—undercut the autonomy and singularity of the single image in favor of typological accumulations, serial progressions, or narrative sequences that required the active participation of the viewer in the making of meaning. The late 1970s saw a renewed interest in the psychological, social, and rhetorical functions of imagery, and artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince used the camera to show how representations shape our sense of self and the world around us, and not vice versa. In the new decade, the scale and ambition of photography expanded dramatically, absorbing elements of painting, performance, and cinema to make highly seductive pictures with enough power and impact to break through the passivity and habit of a culture addicted to the consumption of images.

The accelerated pace of technological change during the 1990s greatly transformed the way in which visual information was perceived and processed, with the line between reality and the imagination becoming increasingly blurred. The hallucinatory clarity of Rodney Graham’s upside-down tree, Sharon Lockhart’s reflection-filled hotel room, and Uta Barth’s luminous river view are all, nevertheless, rooted in an exploration of analog photography’s unique technical and material underpinnings, pushed to the point of a bedazzled transcendence. This fervent experimentalism, combined with a profound understanding of the medium’s complex history and relationship to other media, provides a template for the works of photographic art to be featured in this new hall.

September 25, 2007–March 23, 2008
Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, 2nd floor