Exhibition

Drawing on the remarkable history of 19th-century survey photography of the Great Plains, West and West was also inspired by the landscapes Joe Deal saw as a child while driving west from his home in Topeka, Kansas, to visit relatives in Great Bend. While West and West eschews the imagery of development for which Deal is best known, this project still connotes the impact of human-initiated processes by asking the viewer to think historically and consider what has and has not changed in the landscape.

Examines his prodigious photographic output in relation to his fascinating biography, which spans nearly the entire twentieth century and several continents. The exhibition also addresses his broad engagement with modern art in its diverse forms and traditions.

From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curator Lyle Rexer defines abstraction as “a departure from or the eliding of an immediately apprehensible subject.” Within this broad definition, a host of approaches explore aspects of the photographic experience, including the chemistry of traditional photography, the mediation of lenses, the direct capture of light without a camera, temporal extensions, digital sampling of found images, radical cropping, and various deliberate destabilizations of photographic reference. Exhibition artists include: Bill Armstrong, Carel Balth, Adam Broomberg, Ellen Carey, Oliver Chanarin, Roland Fischer, Michael Flomen, Manuel Geerinck, Shirine Gill, Barbara Kasten, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Edward Mapplethorpe, Chris McCaw, Roger Newton, Jack Sal, Penelope Umbrico, Randy West, Silvio Wolf, and Ilan Wolf.

Connor embraces a wide range of subject matter. Connecting the physical and the spritual world, she has worked extensively in India, Indonesia, Turkey, Cambodia, Egypt, Tibet, and the American Southwest. Included in the exhibition are some of her best known images from the past three decades, along with new works that have never been exhibited publicly.

Inspired by the bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–06), American photographer Robert Adams’s most recent project offers a new and unsparing look at the territory the explorers opened for development. His pictures are also a clear-eyed meditation on hope.

Love—l’amour—is one of art’s enduring themes, inspiring collectors as well as creators. Stéphane Janssen, Belgian by birth and resident in Arizona, discovered a love of art in his teenage years. He went on to assemble an extensive and entirely unique collection including almost every creative medium: painting, ceramics, photography, and more. For this exhibition, Janssen generously shares a group of contemporary photographs that reflect his vision as a patron.

The photographer Milton Rogovin has been likened to the great social documentary photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. An exhibition of the 96-year-old photographer’s works will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography. Rogovin’s work speaks of the humanity of working people, the poor, and society’s “forgotten ones.” In the last year, the Center received approximately 340 Rogovin prints; these include gifts and promised gifts of 11 donors and the Rogovin family. These works will form the beginning of the Rogovin Collection at the Center, which will house more holdings of works and archival documents by the photographer than any other institution.