The New York Public Library’s Photography Collection is celebrated with “Recollection: Thirty Years of Photography at The New York Public Library,” a multimedia exhibition featuring the work of more than 90 prominent photographers, including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Duane Michals, August Sander, André Kertész, Cindy Sherman, and Willam Wegman. The exhibition is on view through January 2.
“Recollection” shares work from the library’s photography collection in a physical exhibition in the Print Gallery & Stokes Gallery at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (42nd Street at Fifth Avenue) as well as online at http://exhibitions.nypl.org/recollection.
“This exhibition is not only an attempt to show another, perhaps less well-known side of the Photography Collection, it’s meant also as an homage to the first ‘recollection’ of photographs at NYPL 30 years ago,” says Stephen Pinson, exhibiti curator and assistant director for arts, prints and photographs and the Robert B. Menschel curator of the photography collection.
“I have gathered together these photographs under the broad category of portraiture in order to celebrate their diverse origins as well as their shared destiny, a destiny that I think Cartier-Bresson had in mind when he described portraits as ‘visual reverberations.’ Photographs make us remember, they remind us and recall things, but they also recall one another.”
The show is not a survey exhibition of photographic history and processes, but rather a carefully curated work loosely based on the genre of “portraiture.” People and human nature are the subjects of the work featured.
The earliest work, for example, is Zaida Ben-Yusuf’s “Grover Cleveland” from 1901; the latest portraits, by Stephen Dupont and Robin Bowman, are both from 2004.
Photography at the New York Public Library traces its origins back to the opening of the Astor Library in 1849, a decade after Louis Daguerre announced the first commercially viable photographic process to the world. Photographs have been part of the library ever since and the collection today comprises 500,000 photographs by 6,000 photographers.
For more information, 212-592-7730 or www.nypl.org .
