"Calla," Imogen Cunningham,
circa 1929. Gelatin silver print.
Seeing the
Unseen:
PRINCETON, N.J - "Seeing the Unseen: Abstract Photography,
1900-1940," will open February 4 at the Princeton University Art
Museum.
"Photography was initially invented, in part, to allow the exact
recording of the way the world and its objects appeared to a
sharp-sighted observer," notes Anne McCauley, the David Hunter
McAlpin professor of the history of photography and modern art at
Princeton University, who organized the exhibition. As painters
began to reject Renaissance perspective in favor of alternative
aesthetic ideas, fine arts photographers also began to break with
convention, making images that were self-consciously flat,
allusive, and nonreferential.
Like artists in the radical art movements of Cubism, Futurism,
and Constructivism, Twentieth Century photographers experimented
with vantage points, framing, and lighting to achieve the
fragmentation of Picasso or the complex intersecting planes of
Lissitsky. They also applied techniques borrowed from both
filmmakers and scientists, including the use of negative prints,
cameraless photograms, closeups, lens distortions and montage.
The exhibition traces these developments with works by such
artists as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham,
Gyorgy Kepes, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Outerbridge,
Alfred Steiglitz, and Edward Weston, as well as with examples of
the commercial and advertising photographs found in
contemporaneous books and periodicals.
The exhibition is organized in conjunction with Professor
McCauley's course "Masters and Movements of Twentieth-Century
Photography," in which she examines the ways photography has been
"transformed from a poor stepchild of the fine arts to a staple
of museum exhibitions."
The museum is located in the middle of the Princeton
University campus, next to Prospect House and Gardens. Due to
construction, visitors should use the temporary entrance on the
west side of the building, cross the green from Dod Hall. For
information, 609-258-3788 or www.princetonartmuseum.org
