Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940 tells the story of photography's first 100 years through the work of 13 key figures who helped shape the aesthetic and expressive course of the medium: Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton, Carleton Watkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Edouard Baldus, Charles Marville, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï.
Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 3, 2008, the exhibition will present 10 to 12 iconic works by each of these influential artists, to convey a broad sense of their contributions to photography. Many of the works displayed in Framing a Century are drawn from the acclaimed Gilman Paper Company Collection, which was acquired by the Museum in 2005.
"The exhibition highlights the way in which the recently acquired Gilman Collection meshes perfectly with the Museum's existing collection to create deep, rich holdings of work by many of the most important masters of the first century of photography," noted Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. "There are, of course, many other individual masterpieces in the collection by a host of photographers, but this exhibition allows us to sense the full achievement of some of the medium's greatest artists."
Framing a Century begins with beautifully preserved works by three photographers of architecture and landscape: the Englishman Roger Fenton (1819–1869), the American Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), and the Frenchman Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884). The selection of works by Le Gray, who is now represented in the Met's collection by more than 40 photographs, spans the artist's entire career, from his early views of Fontainebleau Forest and medieval architecture to his famed seascapes of the mid-1850s and his final pictures, made in Egypt.
The next section focuses on the pioneering work of paper photography's inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), and two masters of portraiture, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) in England and Nadar (1820–1910) in France. The following grouping of photographers — Edouard Baldus (1813–1889), Charles Marville (1816–1879), and Eugène Atget (1857–1927) — explores the history, landscape, and streets of Paris and the French countryside.
The exhibition concludes with the work of four artists who were significant in transforming photography into a modern visual language: Man Ray (1890–1976), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), Brassaï (1899–1984), and Walker Evans (1903–1975). The Man Ray photographs on view, for example, will capture the broad creative scope of his work in the 1920s and 1930s, including portraits of fellow artists Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau; documentation of his own ephemeral sculptures; and photographs that reveal his dynamic experimentation with the plasticity of the medium through solarization, photograms, negative prints, and film. -- www.metmuseum.org
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