Regarding Place: Photographs From The University Art Collections
July 1 – September 10 2011
University Art Museum
Group Exhibition<
Regarding Place: Photographs from the University Art Collections features over eighty black-and-white photographs that consider the resonance of a given site, be it natural or man-made. The works selected provide a wide-ranging look into the shifting roles that landscape and place have played in the trajectory of modern photography. From Edward Steichen’s formal meditations on the luminous and shadowed verticality of Manhattan Island, to Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s dramatic compositions of the vast terrain and hidden recesses of the Mexican landscape, many of the photographs suggest portraits of places with specific and deeply rooted associations. Other images reflect the expanded definition of photography that occurred in the second half of the twentiethcentury. Embracing a new documentary objectivity, these artists approach photography with a clinical eye and produce serial rather than singular images. Douglas Huebler’s rigorous yet random inventory of locations in Seattle and New York City, or Andy Warhol’s spontaneous shots of ordinary moments in New York City and in undisclosed locations around the world, represent this shift away from a romanticized view of landscape to a more matter-of-fact description of the places we inhabit. Shown together, the photographs in Regarding Place foreground the direct and emotive appeal of black and white photography, while also informing current photography's renewed interest in faithfully reproducing the visual world
