Exhibition

A leading figure in American landscape photography, Frank Gohlke creates pictures that explore how we live and build our lives surrounded by a natural world that rarely meets our ideals and expectations. With 85 black-and-white and color photographs ranging up to 42-by-54 inches, Accommodating Nature surveys Gohlke’s career, beginning with work from the seminal 1975 New Topographics exhibition and continuing through projects he is immersed in today. The show includes two of Gohlke’s most important bodies of work: depictions of the destruction and rebuilding after a devastating tornado struck Wichita Falls in 1979, and a multi-year investigation of the effects of the massive volcanic explosion that blew off the top of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

Take a visual tour of the state's famous places and iconic symbols, from the Grand Canyon to the Hoover Dam, and from the majestic saguaro to San Xavier del Bac. Phoenix Art Museum commemorates the 100th year of Arizona statehood by drawing examples from one of the state's treasures—the photographic collection at the Center for Creative Photography.

This exhibition brings together works by the Center’s most beloved photographers, like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Aaron Siskind, as well as some of the state’s great image makers, like David Muench, Dick Arentz and John Schaefer.

An exploration of the photographic portrait - the stories portraits can tell, the ways photographers convey the essence of their subjects and the impact of the relationship between photographer and subject. Including nearly 60 portraits from the Center for Creative Photography, as well as key loans from a few local collections, the exhibition raises engaging questions:

How does a portrait become iconic?

What is unique about a photographic self-portrait?

What are the advantages of working in the studio, or in the field?

How do photographers use setting, pose, camera angle, or scale to add meaning to a picture?

Prints by some of the greatest portraitists and photographic image-makers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century are included: Southworth and Hawes, Gertrude Kasebier, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon.

In 2010, the Center for Creative Photography celebrated its thirty‐fifth anniversary which posed an opportunity to look back on past accomplishments and celebrate recent activities. Creative Continuum presents a variety of photographs and archival objects acquired by the Center for Creative Photography over the past 36 years, demonstrating the diversity of the collection and the range of materials it preserves.

Curated by River Bullock, the Center's 2011-2012 Ansel Adams Intern, and presented in conjunction with Speaking in Tongues, this group of works from the Center’s collection illustrates Los Angeles photography from 1890s-1990s, including photographs by William Henry Jackson, Margrethe Mather, Garry Winogrand, and Catherine Opie. Image Credit: Max Yavno, Self-Service, 1978. ©1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation.

The name Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is nearly synonymous with Yosemite Valley, but the world renowned photographer also had a special connection to Arizona. Perhaps the most important Arizona link was Adams’s 1975 decision to co-found the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and to place his entire photographic collection and archive in the care of this new institution.

From a photographic perspective, Adams had early excursions to the desert southwest, going first to New Mexico, and later to Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, Saguaro National Monument, and southern Arizona’s spectacular San Xavier Mission. Adams celebrated some of these places in the tourist magazine Arizona Highways, and the income from those publications allowed more extended visits to the state.

This group of nearly forty photographs shows the wide range of work Ansel Adams produced in Arizona and throughout the American West. From quiet studies of natural details to the awe inspiring grandeur of massive mountains under cloud filled skies, Adams chronicled the land with passion. The intensity he brought to his artwork was fueled by his own deep appreciation of the transformative power of the wilderness, which he also expressed in a lifetime of environmental activism.

W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978), a compassionate and intense photojournalist, was tremendously prolific from the Second World War through the midpoint of the 20th century. He produced a series of essays for Life magazine which made an impact on American culture then and have continued to be poignant testaments from this period of rich cultural transition. The power of the photographs and the success of his essays were a result of Smith’s intimate involvement with his subjects.

This exhibition will draw on the Center for Creative Photography’s W. Eugene Smith archive to illustrate some of these groundbreaking essays, including coverage of the WWII Pacific theater and post-war stories such as Country Doctor of 1948, and Spanish Village and Nurse Midwife of 1951. In addition to fine prints, copies of vintage Life magazines will be on view, along with Smith’s own contact sheets, hand-written notes, correspondence and other personal documents.