A Night View of Broadway looking North from 45th Street, 1923. New York Edison Co. Photographic Bureau (American, active 1901 – 1936) Gelatin silver print. 84.XM.239.68.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
J. Paul Getty Museum Presents ‘In Focus: Electric!’ ‘In Focus: Electric!’, on view April 5 – August 28, 2016, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlights historic photographs that show the allure of artificial illumination as well as recent photographs that express unease about life tethered to the grid.]]>
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum
“The development of photography as both an art form and an ever-changing technology has been essential to modern experience since the mid-19th century,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition explores how photographers have engaged with another key component of modern life —electrical power— both as a physical phenomenon and as a visual metaphor for energy and life-force in nature.”
The exhibition of thirty-nine photographs is part of the Museum’s “In Focus” series of exhibitions that showcase themes drawn from the Getty’s holdings of over 50,000 photographs. Adds Potts: “Previous exhibitions over the past nine years have looked at animals, trees, the nude, still life, architecture, and the work of single artists such as Ansel Adams. “In Focus: Electric!” may very well be one of the most surprising and creative explorations of our collection yet.”
The first section of the exhibition features images that convey photographers’ reactions when faced with the changes wrought by artificial illumination. A number of modernist artists pictured widespread access to electricity as a beacon of progress, and photographed fast-growing cities where electricity was prevalent and sometimes inescapable. On view will be photographs by Alfred Steiglitz (American, 1864-1946), André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985), Andreas Feininger (American, 1906-1999), and others that capture shimmering streetlights at night in New York, Paris, and Stockholm. Such works are balanced by a 1984 photograph by Robert Adams (American, born 1937), which shows the encroachment of light pollution in a Colorado landscape.
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