This is the first gallery at the Norton Museum of Art that is dedicated to the permanent
collection.
As a curator, one of the things I always look to is, how do my objects relate to the rest
of the museum?
You wanna have the collections speak to one another.
In this case, it speaks across centuries.
I decided that for the first six years, I would follow the great questions of journalism.
So this year, there will be three rotations of who?
A short history of photography through portraiture, each one, in this case, addressing how we
look at them as a contemporary audience with contemporary eyes, and that's important.
We start with the very beginnings of photography.
We start with daguerreotypes, 1839, and we end with 21st centuries.
We really do brush against the major artistic currents of both America and Europe.
The funny thing about early photography is that it went through so many incarnations.
The real big deal was to figure out how am I gonna make this negative so that it's as
crisp and clear an image as it was when it was a daguerreotype?
Somebody comes up with the idea that they are going to use glass plates, so that, once
it's set, it's clear, and you get, as in this portrait of Lincoln by Hesler, you get incredible
detail.
You see the wrinkles, you see the moles, you see everything, how the hair lays, which was
something that, prior to this, it was difficult to do because they were using paper negatives.
We always see him with a beard.
He's supposed to have a beard, but here it is, prebeard, which I rather like.
The other thing that's on this wall, and the reason I put these two together, this is an
image by Julia Margaret Cameron, and I have to tell you that Julia Margaret Cameron was
an anomaly in the whole photo world.
And I say that because, A, she's a woman, and it was a guy's world.
This is Sir John Herschel, and Herschel is important not only for being a polymath, but
being incredibly brilliant, but he's also the one that coins the term, photography.
And the reason I put them together, as you can see, they're so different.
She's really looking at it as an art.
This is really a political statement.
We think they're so simple, and yet, they're really, really complex little objects.
From the 19th century to the '30s, cameras change.
They get more sophisticated, and more than that, they get smaller.
Photographers can roam the streets, and nobody really knows they're taking pictures, so they're
not reacting as if they're having their photograph taken.
In the 19th century, there was this, when people had leisure time, people would walk
around the streets of, primarily Paris, the metropolitan areas, just looking at other
people.
They were called flaneurs.
Cartier Bresson was probably the midcentury's most important photographic flaneur.
He was that amazing talent that was able to anticipate when all of the stars would align,
and then take the picture just as everything was coalescing into what he called the decisive
moment.
He really is the godfather of street photography.
The really great thing about this piece is that, A, it is a joyful piece, it is postwar.
So here you have, you're in the streets of Paris, postwar, postoccupation.
Cartier Bresson is playing with his camera, with the depth of field, so you can see that
he's completely in focus.
He's really vignetted, that one moment of pride of place, pride of adulthood for this
little kid.
Arne Svenson found a collector and the collector was really amazing insofar as he had hundreds
and hundreds of sock monkeys, and yet each sock monkey had its own personality, and so
Arne goes through and takes these very formal portraits of sock monkeys.
It would never happen in the 19th century, wouldn't've happened in the middle of the
20th century, but by the time you get to the end of the 20th century, all of these ideas
are playing through, and all the photographers are thinking about not only what kind of pictures
do I take, but what happens when I take them?
And that's a key for the end of the 20th century, moving into the 21st.
If you are looking at contemporary art right now, you'll see, oh my god, everything's really
big and really colorful!
That's the period we're in, and if we have anyone to blame for that, it is the German
photographer, in this case, Thomas Ruff, but also, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky.
It's completely neutralized.
There's no expression, there's no emotion.
It's really about this head as an object, as a thing that we have unlimited access to.
Avedon once said that portraits are just the surface.
You can get nothing more and nothing less, it's only the surface, whereas we are led
to believe from the time we're tiny, that through a great photograph, you can see into
the person's soul.
Take your pick.
The Germans don't think so.