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Philadelphia Museum of Art's Photography Collection
| Artist Georgia O'Keeffe inaugurated the Philadelphia Museum of Art's photography collection in 1949 when she gave the museum an important group of photographs by her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe made donations to a number of museums at that time, when she was organizing Stieglitz's estate. "Her gift included works from every phase of his career," said Peter Barberie, the museum's Brodsky Curator of Photographs and a juror for the upcoming Photography Portfolio Competition sponsored by the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1968, another major gift of Stieglitz's work came from the photographer Dorothy Norman, who founded the Alfred Stieglitz Center that year after consulting with the museum's director, Dr. Evan Turner. Norman pledged her collection to the museum, which included her own photographs and works by many other important photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. "She also provided money to buy new photographs, including large groups of work by Robert Frank and Frederick H. Evans", Barberie said. The collection began to grow, and new Curator Michael Hoffman's vision would have a substantial impact. "Michael Hoffman organized fantastic exhibitions - large traveling exhibits that would premiere in Philadelphia and then travel around the world," Barberie said. Hoffman often acquired the entire contents of an exhibition for the collection. "As a result, we have large groups of work by several important artists, including W. Eugene Smith, Robert Adams, and Graciela Iturbide" he said. The Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a major retrospective exhibition of Paul Strand's work in 1971, which traveled to many cities for almost a decade. Because of this, Strand and his widow, Hazel, were very committed to the museum. In 1980 Strand's estate gave the museum the Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, which includes more than 500 prints spanning the artist's career. "Because of Michael Hoffman's efforts, we have tremendous depth in some of the key figures in the history of photography," Barberie said. But there were many gaps to fill. In 2001, the museum acquired the Julien Levy collection, which included many significant modernist and surrealist works from the 1920s and '30s, including top examples by German, French, Mexican, and U.S. photographers. Another important collection was acquired in 2002, Pictorialist photographs that had been collected by the art historian William Innes Homer. "We've been collecting in more of a building-block way since then," Barberie said. "Our ideal is to collect the whole history of photography." The museum has thousands of beautiful, historical and noteworthy photographs. We asked Barberie to choose five of the collection's most important photographs and explain the significance of the print and the photographer. Paul Strand, considered one of the first modernist photographers, grew up in New York City and began photographing life there in the 1910s. He helped establish photography as an art form through his work over 60 years. Wall Street, 1915. Barberie: "This is arguably Paul Strand's most iconic photograph, combining his radical formal experimentation of the 1910s with his other major pictorial concern, the human figure in the modern environment. This platinum print is one of only two he made of the image in 1916, and it is one of the Museum's great treasures." Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879. Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India to a family of British diplomats. She received a camera as a gift at age 48 and quickly developed her signature intimate portrait style. Her style is still imitated today. Mrs. Herbert Duckworth. In the 1860s, Julia Margaret Cameron upended photography's basic tenets, often making pictures out of focus and surrounding her portrait subjects with darkness. This portrait of her niece seems to collar the beautiful young woman with stars: in fact they are the beads on her dress, which catch the reflected light of Cameron's studio. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, 1902-2002. Manuel Álvarez Bravo started photographing in Mexico in the mid 1920s. Often associated with the European surrealist artists, he concentrated on rituals, illusion, and eroticism in his many street scenes, nudes, and landscapes. Optical Parable, 1931. This photograph turns the act of seeing into a mysterious and strange adventure. Álvarez Bravo photographed a Mexico City optician's shop with wonderful signage, and then printed the negative in reverse. Eugène Atget, 1857-1927. Eugène Atget was a sailor and itinerant actor from Bourdeaux, France, who began making photographs in Paris in the 1890s to sell to painters, graphic artists, and architects to use as studies for their own projects. He ultimately made thousands of photographs documenting the city, including its architecture, classic gardens and the streets and street vendors who contributed to the fabric of the city. He is considered an urban historian. Prostitute, Paris, 1921. It seems to me that when Eugène Atget made this photograph of a prostitute in 1921, both photographer and subject enjoyed their encounter. Atget had photographed the street trades of Paris 20 years earlier, and he clearly saw this picture and a few others he made of prostitutes as an extension of that earlier series, which celebrated the varied street life of the city. Robert Frank, b. 1924. Robert Frank was born to a Jewish family in Switzerland and emigrated to the United States after World War II. In the mid-1950s, he traveled across the country for two years making photographs for his groundbreaking book The Americans, which looked beneath the surface of American life. He lives and works in Nova Scotia, Canada and New York City. Bar, New York City, 1955. The Museum has more than 50 Robert Frank photographs, most of them from his 1955 series 'The Americans.' This picture in a bar captures the sense of alienation that is shot through the series. Even though he made these pictures like snapshots, with a handheld 35mm camera, Frank carefully composed each one, deploying frames within frames that serve to single out figures or jukeboxes for lonely portraits. |
About the Author
Philadelphia Museum of Art Photography Competition - A jury of nationally recognized photography experts will select six entries for inclusion in a 16" x 20" portfolio to be published and exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in an edition of 25 in fall 2010.
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