John Beasley Greene, “Giza. Pyramid of Cheops, or Khufu”, 1853–54; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; purchased as a gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg.
John Beasley Greene photos at SFMOMA The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents ‘Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene’. August 31, 2019–January 5, 2020.]]>
Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
In 1853, at the age of 21, John Beasley Greene (1832–56) set out for Egypt armed with a camera and a passion for archaeology. Over the course of an exceptionally brief career, he created a body of photographs in North Africa that was admired by his peers and which continues to capture the attention of contemporary audiences. Not only did he provide detailed records of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Algerian antiquities that helped advance the field, but his pictures also offer the sensitive impressions of a thoughtful visitor in an unfamiliar land. Greene was acutely attuned to the aesthetic possibilities of photography, and his compositions display a masterful grasp of the relationship between negative and positive space. He died at 24, leaving behind few records but hundreds of pictures. This exhibition, his first museum survey show, presents Greene’s visual record of the archaeological and colonial concerns of mid-19th-century France and a singular vision for the photographic description of landscape.
In conjunction with “Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene, SFMOMA will present “Hannah Collins: I Will Make Up a Song”, a video and photography installation that explores the work of Egyptian Modernist architect Hassan Fathy. Fascinated by issues of housing, poverty and environmental sustainability, Collins (b. 1956) considers Fathy’s mid-20th-century utopian experiments in sustainable architecture and rural community building at New Gourna and New Baris in Egypt, which raised important questions that seem ever more pertinent today.
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