Beyond Place: Recent Photography Acquisitions

2010

From its invention, the camera has been trained on the world to record, illuminate, and interpret what exists beyond the limits of immediate human perception and physical experience. Photography was seen early on as having the potential to reach beyond the classic tropes of painting—the figure, still life, architectural and landscape subjects—to document the world absolutely. Following behind explorers, armies, and the restless throughout the nineteenth century, the camera and the photographic images it created would define the nature of place and confirm the cultural stereotypes of the age. It gave an ever-expanding population documentary proof of social change and visual access to the "other" on far distant shores as well as at home. Photography further served to record and catalogue specific details of the world without obvious emotion or manipulation well into the twentieth century, with a line of practitioners that stretches from William Henry Jackson, Francis Frith, and Eugène Atget to Alfred Stieglitz, Bill Brandt, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. By the 1950s, the work of Robert Frank brought a certain sense of alienation to the recording of place and everyday life in keeping with the ethos of the cold war period, an approach that diverged from the earlier documentary stream. It is from inside that altered sensibility and expanded model of documentary photography that the current selection from the Museum's permanent collection presents itself.

Since 2003, the Museum, with the support of James and Susan Winkler, has set about to expand its holdings of contemporary photography and, related to that effort, to chronicle the exhibition history of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland through gifts and purchases from their exhibitions. It is from the resulting Blue Sky Gallery Collection of more than three hundred images that the fifty works on view were drawn. The exhibition explores "place" as a subject of investigation by an international roster of artists. The selected works are, in the main, free of the human figure and the focus instead is on the power of the photograph to imaginatively transport the viewer; to open up emotional musings, and to reveal the unknown.

Before photography, one knew the world through direct experience and story telling, much as a child discovers and masters the world one step at a time. When photography emerged in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, local personal experience was supplanted by knowledge of the world gained from the proliferating photographic images, whose startling detail bestowed upon the medium the mantle of truth. Though from the beginning photographs were sometimes manipulated in the camera or the darkroom, belief in the truthfulness of the photograph remained largely intact until the digital age, when the veracity of the image was fully undermined by the potential for seamless in-computer manipulation. Though photography might well still provide a documentary core of information, it is clearly no longer sacrosanct.

Today, with Photoshop, the digital image file is subject to complete alteration of everything from color balance to actual content, rendering it potentially more fiction than fact. Where once the photograph was considered an independent corroborative source—a form of witness—it is now a highly mediated form of visual narrative that may carry only the slimmest trace of what was originally seen by the photographer and recorded by the camera. As viewers, we can no longer trust the image, and yet we remain susceptible to its power. In a sense, given digital editing tools and practices, contemporary photography can become an equivocal and subjective form in much the same way that painting has traditionally been an expressive vehicle.

Curated by Bruce Guenther