PHOTO:The Poetics of Place, Part II

Metropolitan Museum of Art began collecting photographs in 1928, when Alfred Stieglitz made the first of several important gifts to the Museum. The Met’s Department of Photographs established as an independent curatorial department in 1992, and houses a collection of more than 25,000 works spanning the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present (Part I).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Archive

The 41 works in the exhibition “The Poetics of Place: Contemporary Photographs from The Met Collection” survey the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have photographed landscape and the built world over the last half Century. The exhibition opens with works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s by artists working in America and Europe, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dan Graham, and Donald Judd, who brought the lessons of Minimal and Conceptual art to bear on views of nature, both raw and acculturated. Also included is a series of unique Polaroid prints from the mid-’70s made by Walker Evans in and around Hale County, Alabama, nearly 40 years following his classic images of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Images from the ‘80s and ‘90s attest to a swing away from the de-skilling associated with radical ‘60s art-making and toward a new interest in technically assured large-scale prints that nevertheless incorporated earlier lessons from Land Art, Conceptualism, and other postwar Avant-Garde Movements. This section features works by Lothar Baumgarten, Sally Mann, An-My Lê,Toshio Shibata, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. The exhibition concludes with recently made works by artists including: Matthew Brandt, Roe Ethridge, Sarah Anne Johnson, and Wolfgang Staehle, whose mesmerizing work “Eastpoint (September 15, 2004)” (2004–6) projects a 24-hour cycle of over 8,000 still images synchronized to real time of the same Hudson River that inspired the American painters like: Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.

Info: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, Duration: 12/12/16-28/5/17, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 10:00-17:30, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org