Exhibit explores early days of photographyDate: 4/8/2016 SPRINGFIELD – A new exhibit at the Michelle and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts will bring back viewers to the turn of the 20th Century when photography was recognized as more than just a means to record an image and became an art form.
“Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography” will be on view from April 12 through Aug. 28 and features works from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions; the media partner for “Photo-Secession” is ArtScope Magazine.
Julia Courtney, the Museums’ curator of Art, described the photographers featured in the exhibit – that include Alfred Stieglitz, Anne Brigman, Arthur Wesley Dow, Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Ksebier, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Karl Struss, and Clarence White – as “a really experimental group pushing the boundaries of photography.” The photographers called their approach to the medium “Pictorialism.”
In the dark room they manipulated their negatives and prints to create images that had the visual qualities of drawings, etchings, and oil paintings. The 78 works in the current touring exhibit include prime examples of a variety of photographic printing techniques used by the Pictorialists, such as the use of platinum, gum bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil in creating prints.
Courtney said the group “challenged traditional photography.” She added there was “a bit of mixed reaction” to their work, but it was not as negative as other art movements, such as Impressionism, has been received. “Some were skeptical,” she said. “The caliber of the artist helped its acceptance.”
The exhibit also shows that next phase of photographic art, “Modernism,” which is represented by the inclusion of Stieglitz’s “The Steerage,” which divided the Pictorialism movement.
Courtney believes the exhibit “eye-opening for people more adept at digital photography.” It will show “how we got to where we are,” she added.
She noted that some of the tools that photographers could use today in program such as Photoshop harken back to what these photographers were doing in the darkroom with chemicals and exposure techniques. Courtney said many of the techniques used by the photographers whose work is in the exhibit took “hours upon hours” in the darkroom.
“The common thread [between digital and traditional photography] is the artistry,” she added. The difference, though, is “the artist’s hand is more present because of the physicality of the changes that were made,” she explained.
A companion exhibit, “Monochrome: Black and White Photography from the Permanent Collection,” is currently on view and features photographs from the D’Amour Museum’s collections by artists working in the documentary genre. The featured photographers include Richard Buswell, Mark Chester, Edward Curtis, Michael Jacobson-Hardy, Dorothea Lange and Seymour Lehrer. “Monochrome” will be on view through Sept. 25.
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