Photography exhibit is about process as well as the images

Apr. 28--Whip out that camera phone and you're instantly a photographer. Download the image to your computer and you're capable of sophisticated manipulations ranging from cropping to altering colors to adding textures. That's how it is in this modern digital age, but really, it'...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inKnight Ridder Tribune Business News p. 1
Main Author Cohen, Keri Guten
Format Newsletter
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Tribune Content Agency LLC 28.04.2006
Subjects
Art galleries & museums
Brady, Mathew
Cameron, Julia Margaret
Jennings, William N
Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865)
Photographers
Photography
Steward, James
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Summary:Apr. 28--Whip out that camera phone and you're instantly a photographer. Download the image to your computer and you're capable of sophisticated manipulations ranging from cropping to altering colors to adding textures. That's how it is in this modern digital age, but really, it's not all that much different from what history's earliest photographers did when they left behind their artistic sensibilities even as they were discovering the photographic process. That's a key concept behind "Rethinking the Photographic Image: The Best of Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection," a major survey exhibition running through June 25 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. "What we mean by 'rethinking' happens in several different ways," says UMMA director James Christen Steward. "There is no single history of photography -- it's an ever-changing construct that shifts as our own history shifts." "We've also tried to emphasize the interventionist nature of making a photograph," Steward says. Though many viewers consider photographs as authentic documents of a moment in time, "there are always conscious decisions -- how an image is cropped, how people are posed, how long of an exposure. This challenges the notion that photography is a more impersonal and impartial media than painting and sculpture."