Exhibition

"Each individual photograph is part of a process, the result of experimentation, persistence, research, accident, and luck. The Center hopes that this special exhibition of popular images together with archive pieces helps viewers think about masterpieces and how they came to be,” said Britt Salvesen, Center curator and interim director. Making a Photograph: Iconic Images and Their Origins presents evidence of this process—negatives, field notes, contact sheets, source material—casting iconic images in a new light and expanding our sense of photography’s expressive potential.

In 1930s, a small group of California photographers challenged the painterly, soft-focus Pictorialist style of the day. They argued that photography could only advance as an art if its practitioners exploited characteristics inherent to the camera’s mechanical nature. This small association of innovators – named Group f/64 after the camera aperture which produces great depth of field – included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak, Willard Van Dyke, and others. The Center for Creative Photography now revisits this debate in the exhibition Debating Modern Photography: The Triumph of Group f/64. In addition to major works by members of Group f/64, it includes images by such Pictorialists as Anne Brigman, William Dassonville, Johan Hagemeyer, William Mortensen, and Karl Struss.

The middle decades of the twentieth century mark the golden age of photojournalism, when heroic cameramen and -women went out into the field to track down stories, hard-working editors crafted layouts and captions, and curious Americans devoured illustrated magazines such as Life, Look, and Collier’s. Leafing through the pages of these magazines, readers would encounter hundreds of photographs, many of them merely supplying the who, what, and where. Other pictures, however, also addressed the how and why.

Brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. The archive of Robert Heinecken resides at the Center for Creative Photography and this is the first major exhibition of his work to be shown at the Center. This exhibition examines how these two artists bridged modernist and emerging post-modernist trends by ushering in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Focusing on language and the creation of new visual codes, as well as on the little-known friendship between Berman and Heinecken, their works are explored within the unique cultural milieu of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified each artist’s highly original approach to making images.

Originally held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in January 1975, this was one of those rare exhibitions that effect a permanent change in the development of an art form. The show brought together ten contemporary photographers who collectively defined the emergence of a new approach to landscape: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel, Jr. These artists engaged with their medium and its history in different ways, while simultaneously dealing with issues such as environmentalism, capitalism, and national identity. Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement or style.

In 1985, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas organized the exhibition In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon. The project opened to widespread acclaim and was, in fact, one of the most highly attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Although small groups of prints from the exhibition have been periodically exhibited since 1985 (and included by Avedon in his retrospective exhibitions), a larger portion of the project has not been seen in the United States since its initial tour. Seventy-eight of the original 124 portraits will be on view, including all of the project’s most important and best-known images.

Inspired by the recent revival of the influential and critically acclaimed New Topographics exhibition from 1975, shown at the Center and continuing its national and international tour, Locating Landscape links a new generation of photographers with the New Topographics movement that so greatly influenced them. Margot Anne Kelley and Christiana Caro studied with Frank Gohlke; Andrew Freeman studied with Lewis Baltz; and Paho Mann and Adam Thorman studied with Mark Klett as well as Bill Jenkins, the original curator of New Topographics at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.