Exhibition

Image: Betty Hahn, Untitled (The Lone Ranger), 1976 from The New Mexico Portfolio, 1976. Collection Center for Creative Photography © Betty Hahn

At the beginning of the twentieth century, newly perfected photographic printmaking techniques made it possible to reproduce photographic images in ink cheaply and in massive quantities. As a result, photographic imagery made its way into books, newspapers, magazines, posters, billboards, and postcards. By mid-century, photography, specifically photography in print, was a dominant form of visual communication. A diversity of artists began adopting photographic printmaking techniques. They were drawn to the hybrid medium’s potential for accurate reproduction, its integration of a graphic aesthetic with a photographic one, and its democratic nature. These artists developed a range of interdisciplinary approaches that broadened the definition of art. Their prescient investigations of the role of the printed photograph anticipated the ubiquity of the photographic image in our current digital moment.

This exhibition explores the intersections of photography and printmaking from 1960 through the turn of the twenty-first century. It comprises prints, artist’s books, and working materials from the collections of Phoenix Art Museum, the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, and Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries.

This exhibition will explore the many collaborative projects of photographer Mark Klett. Whether working as part of a collective or pairing with a writer or other photographer, a strong component of Klett’s career has been characterized by his choice to create art through collaboration. Through his work with others, especially his former graduate student and long-standing creative partner, Byron Wolfe, Klett realized that collaborating enriched his work, spurred intellectual investigation, and encouraged joy in the artmaking process. This exhibition, featuring photographs from several projects and bodies of work, including the Rephotographic Survey Project, Water in the West, Third View, Yosemite In Time, and as yet unexhibited work from Lake Powell, will explore Klett’s creative practice and the ways that working with others expanded his artistic contributions to the field. 

Wynn Bullock was drawn to photography’s ability to evoke the invisible through the visible—for instance, the way that long exposures could suggest the time-space continuum, or that a fog-filled landscape could suggest the fullness and volume of space. The artists included in this exhibition, the collaborative team Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, Mishka Henner, and Richard Mosse, have used various techniques to make complex and invisible concepts visible in their photographs. Bullock used photography to respond to the scientific discoveries of his day, exploring the place of human beings within the natural world, and, indeed, within the universe. Mosse, Henner, and Anand and Sauer have all chosen to investigate our increasingly entangled geopolitical reality, and the role of photography within it.

Anand and Sauer are producing a body of work entitled Ground Truth, in which they photograph remnants of secret Cold War satellite calibration targets and then digitally render a map of orbiting satellites in the sky overhead to address not only the origins of satellite technology but the massive information network in which we are all suspended. Henner addresses issues of censorship, government secrecy, and paranoia by re-presenting the Netherlands’ optically-altered satellite imagery as beautiful, graphic, horizonless landscapes. Mosse, working with discontinued infrared film designed for distinguishing camouflage-wearing militants from foliage, reveals the Congo landscape and its recent history of violence in acidic colors that, even if they don’t immediately suggest death and destruction, indicate that something in these places is not as it should be. These three bodies of work are just a few among many being produced by contemporary photographers that use the medium to reveal something invisible to eye, and will bring breadth of context to the Center’s presentation of Wynn Bullock: Revelations.

This exhibition represents the most comprehensive assessment of photographer Wynn Bullock’s (American, 1902-1975) extraordinary career in nearly forty years. Bullock worked in the American modernist tradition alongside colleagues and friends Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and Ansel Adams. The arc of Bullock’s innovative achievements is surveyed through more than 100 prints, from his early experimental work of the 1940s, through the mysterious black-and-white imagery of the 1950s and color light abstractions of the 1960s, to his late metaphysical photographs of the 1970s. 

Bullock's work was guided by an intense interest in the mid-twentieth-century dialogue about the structure of the universe and humanity's place within it. Drawn to the spirit of experimentation that marked scientific and philosophic endeavors of his day, Bullock used knowledge about quantum physics, special relativity, and the space-time continuum as a reference point for his own intuitive and deeply personal explorations of the world. Photography for Bullock was a way of meditating on the frightening and exhilarating idea that there is much more to the world than is commonly understood through ordinary perception, and he was passionate about conveying that revelation to others through his work. 

The exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. Support for this exhibition is provided by The Donald and Marilyn Keough Family. Generous in-kind support for this exhibition is provided by Tru Vue, Inc. and Avyve.

Please note that no photography is allowed in the gallery except for images taken of the title wall. Thank you for your cooperation. 

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. No matter, the road is life.” —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

The network of roads in America is immense, and “The Road” looms even larger in American culture. The American road has always been a place of self-discovery both for its individual travelers and, through their narratives, for the country as a whole. True to form, it can move us in opposite directions. It can lead toward a future of greater standardization and bigger development or back into a nostalgic past. It has the potential to either isolate or unify its travelers. Roads cut the landscape in two, but connect the country to itself. The road is linked to the frontier myth, but roads have hastened the congestion of the once-open West. Throughout the history of cars in this country, there has been a sustained impulse to make photographs that describe the varied and contradictory texture of the road, one that continues apace. Longer Ways to Go presents photographs from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography made of, from, on, and in the more than four million miles of road that criss-cross America, over eight decades.

SEE STREET VIEWS - IN THE GALLERY! 

We invite you to see current street views via Google Street View of some locations featured in Longer Ways to Go; use this link to find a gallery of available views. One of the most significant events in the photographic history of the road has been Google’s ongoing Street View  project, an effort to image the world’s roads and their adjacent scenery and use those images to create an immersive environment. In the process of compiling billions of images, Google incidentally captured “rephotographs” of a handful of pictures in this exhibition. Rephotographs—images resulting from returning to the site of an existing photograph to photograph it again—have been used by both artists and scientists to make change visible. Seen in this context, the photographs on the walls become the “before” pictures in a before-and-after sequence. The contemporary Street View images shed light on our values by showing what we have altered and what we’ve chosen to preserve.

For more information on pricing, please visit the Phoenix Art Museum website

The INFOCUS Juried Exhibition of Self-Published PhotoBooks includes 151 self-made contemporary photobooks selected by a jury of seven industry professionals.  Jurors reviewed nearly 300 submissions and selected those photobooks that exhibited thoughtful design, sophisticated relationships of image and text, innovation in the book form, or all these characteristics.  The range of subject matter and approach to book making is so varied, there is sure to be something for everyone.  Books will be displayed on tables to allow exhibition visitors to handle, read, and explore them, a first within the Center’s University of Arizona galleries. 

Flowers, Fruit, Books, Bones: Still Life from the Center forCreative Photography features over sixty still life photographs from the Center’s collection. While many of the works were conceived for a range of purposes outside of fine art, from advertising images to teaching aids, all make full use ofphotography’s ability to render rich detail. Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to slow down and relish the pleasure of close looking.  To deepen the experience of visual contemplation, the photographs are paired with short pieces of text – both poetry and prose – that invite visitors into a space of rumination.

The Center will continue its popular presentation of materials from our archive and fine print vaults for our summer visitors.  A selection of rarely seen archival materials and artworks chosen by the Center’s staff will be housed in flat-file drawers in the Center’s gallery. This presentation of items from the vault will be complemented by a selection of artworks acquired by the Center in the last 18 months, demonstrating the variety and impact of the newest photographs to enrich the Center’s valuable research collection.

This exhibition commemorates the CCP's fortieth year with a selection of distinctive objects from its collection. Featuring a wide range of works, including some of the CCP's most treasured objects, the exhibition will bring together photographs and their related stories, including those told by curators, archivists, and other key figures from the Center's past and present. 

This exhibition, whose title derives from a 1923 poem by William Carlos Williams, assumes the form of a running dialogue between photographic images—past and present—that take as their subject the accumulated byproducts of an American way of life.

Featuring the work of Lucas Blalock, Owen Kydd, and John Lehr, with:
Ansel Adams
Harry Callahan
Walker Evans
Lee Friedlander
Jan Groover
Paul Outerbridge, Jr.
Charles Sheeler
Aaron Siskind
Frederick Sommer
Ralph Steiner
Brett Weston
Edward Weston