A New Vision: Modernist Photography
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
February 4, 2012 – May 13, 2012

This exhibition explores the critical and dynamic role photography played in the development of the Modern Art movement and the reciprocal influences among all media that shaped the modernist visual vocabulary.

Drawn from the Currier’s growing collection of important historic photographs, A New Vision will include 125 works that trace the impact of photography on the development of the modernist movement. Beginning in the early twentieth century, painters, sculptors, photographers and printmakers in Europe and America envisioned a new abstract visual vocabulary that broke from representational traditions of the past. Form and composition became as important as subject matter.

Photographers began using the view finders of their cameras to identify unusual, often close-up perspectives, isolating elements from nature and the man-made world and creating rich abstract compositions. Using these unexpected points of view, artists transformed everyday objects (an engine or a piece of fruit) into expressive compositions. Technical advances in camera equipment and film also inspired new avenues for expressing and exploring the world.

Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams were among the first American modernist photographers to emerge from the pictorialist tradition (which sought to emulate the atmospheric effects of paintings of the time.) Their European counterparts included German-born New Hampshire photographer Lotte Jacobi and her colleagues László Moholy-Nagy and Imre Kinski. While some photographers like Brett Weston experimented with presenting nature or the human body as a generator of abstract forms, others like Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler captured the repeating, hard-edge forms of the rapidly changing industrial landscape.

Click here to view the exhibition checklist.

This special exhibition is supported by Hitchiner Manufacturing Co., Inc. and by Barbara and Thomas Putnam, with additional support from The Mac Doty Education Fund.

_{Image credits: (Untitled)Glen Canyon, 1959, Brett Weston, gelatin silver print, Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2009.3 Photograph by Brett Weston © The Brett Weston Archive brettwestonarchive.com;  Tramway Handles, Boris Ignatovich, 1930s (printed1955), gelatin silver print.Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2011.16 Photo © Estate of Boris Ignatovich/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York; Two Pears, Cushing, ME, 1999, Paul Caponigro, gelatin silver print, Gift of Paul Caponigro, photographer, 2011.26.2  © Paul Caponigro; (Untitled)Fremont Bridge, Portland, 1971, Brett Weston, gelatin silver print, Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection, 2009.9.7}