#PoeticsofPlace Installation Surveys Diverse Ways Contemporary Photographers Have Captured Landscapes and the Built World
Jean-Marc Bustamante (French, born 1952). Tableau (T30.78), 1978, printed 2000. Silver dye bleach print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000 (2000.493.2). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Installation Dates:
December 12, 2016–June 25, 2017
Installation Location:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for
Modern Photography, Gallery 851
The 41 works in the exhibition The Poetics of Place: Contemporary Photographs from The Met Collection will survey the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have photographed landscape and the built world over the last half century. It will be on view December 12, 2016, through June 25, 2017, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition will open with works from the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists working in America and Europe, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dan Graham, and Donald Judd, who brought the lessons of Minimal and Conceptual art to bear on views of nature, both raw and acculturated. Also included will be a series of unique Polaroid prints from the mid-1970s made by Walker Evans in and around Hale County, Alabama, nearly 40 years following his classic images of sharecroppers during the Great Depression.
Images from the 1980s and 1990s attest to a swing away from the de-skilling associated with radical '60s art-making and toward a new interest in technically assured large-scale prints that nevertheless incorporated earlier lessons from Land Art, Conceptualism, and other postwar avant-garde movements. This section will feature works by Lothar Baumgarten, Sally Mann, An-My Lê,Toshio Shibata, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
The exhibition will conclude with recently made works by artists including Matthew Brandt, Roe Ethridge, Sarah Anne Johnson, and Wolfgang Staehle—whose mesmerizing piece Eastpoint (September 15, 2004) (2004-6) projects a 24-hour cycle of over 8,000 still images synchronized to real time of the same Hudson River that inspired such American painters as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.
The Poetics of Place: Contemporary Photographs from The Met Collection is organized by Doug Eklund, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
