Exhibition

Less than 50 years ago, few opportunities existed to showcase fine-art photography. Not satisfied with showing his photography to a limited audience, Ralph Gibson created his own publishing outlet, Lustrum Press. To highlight this seminal period in photographic history, the exhibition Ralph Gibson and Lustrum Press, 1970 – 1984 will be on view.

This exhibition examines national identity as seen by a keen observer, Lee Friedlander. The theme of the “American monument” pervades this decades-long investigation of the social landscape—a photographic genre he formulated in the late 1960s and subsequently refined to a height of finesse. Taking frequent cross-country car trips with his family, Friedlander observed monuments of various sorts cropping up in photographs he took along the way. He began to pursue the theme in earnest.

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.