Landscape photography: dead and forgotten at art museums?

[mdarnton]

I'd like to invert the thread : Forgotten Art Museums that no longer show anything we're interested in.

For highly specific, eccentric values of "we". The lines I see in front of the Art Institute of Chicago, waiting to get in at opening time, out my shop window every morning don't support that conclusion for the usual value of "we".

[BradS]

The Carleton Watkins exhibit is still on display at Cantor Arts Center (Stanford).....not permanent but it is really very excellent.

[Darin Boville]

Oh, the museums are certainly showing interesting stuff. But I found it odd that it was almost entirely in their traveling exhibit areas. For example, in Chicago they have a very good Josef Koudelka show in two large exhibit areas on the ground floor (there were a few panoramic landscapes here, recent work). My two teenage daughters were with me and, unusual for them, they both asked if they could have their own catalogue of the show.

But it is a weird thing to walk through museum after museum, seeing their permanent collection of paintings on display in evolutionary order, without any indication to the public that the evolution of painting just might have been affected in some way by what was going on in photography at the time. They also had a large Steichen exhibit, mostly of movie stars. I found almost all of this work weaker than I recalled, looking indistinguishable from any of the other Hollywood photographer types. It was just the "name that star" game with little else to interest me. Never high on my list, Steichen moves a notch down in my estimation.

Denver had a "from the collection of" show at the top of their new building. St. Louis had the small Brett Weston Show and a deceptively titled "Impressionist France" which I wasn't initially going to bother with due to the extra ticket price and the fact that I find Impressionists paintings boring. But I went to the desk to comment on how there were only thirteen photos in the entire museum and they said there were "a few photographs" in the Impressionist show. Turns out it was a wonderful photography show with a few paintings mixed in, which I ignored.

Nelsen-Atkins had a show of daguerreotype acquisitions--lots of fun. The Detroit Institute of Art had a big Bruce Weber show which I found uncommonly weak. Cleveland's photo gallery was down for an installation of a new exhibit. Akron was showing a room of O. Winston Link images (they were the ones who brought him to fame back in the early 1980s).

MOMA had a good but not great Robert Heinecken show and an odd hodgepodge of a show of photographs held together with the slenderest of themes, photographs made in a studio. The Met had a hallway of photographs from its permanent collection (rotating) and a large and difficult to decide upon Garry Winogrand show--a mix of photographs that he printed, those that he marked for printing but never did, and many that he shot (and maybe did not process) that were selected by others. There was also a very interesting Lucas Samaras show but there were very few photographs in that one, much to my surprise.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some.

So, lots and lots of photography. But almost all of it in traveling exhibit areas. Very little work from the California f/64 school.

But, of course, I could have gone to Houston for the Marville show or to Atlanta for the Wynn Bullock show. But ten museums does seem a fair sample nevertheless...

--Darin

[Darin Boville]

The Carleton Watkins exhibit is still on display at Cantor Arts Center (Stanford).....not permanent but it is really very excellent.

Oh, thank you for mentioning that. I was thinking it would have closed by the time I got back from the trip and I wouldn't get a chance to see it again. (I had tried to go back just before I left but showed up on a Tuesday--didn't realize they were closed on both Monday and Tuesday!).

--Darin

[Bill_1856]

Have you looked at the "Landscape Photography" exhibited on this forum? (Enough said.)

[Jody_S]

Two observations that might be of interest (and surprising) to people here:

1) Very little photography on display in permanent collection galleries. Lots of photography on display in temporary exhibit galleries.

2) Essentially no "straight photography" or f/64-style landscape work on display. A few prints scattered here and there. A tiny Brett Weston show in a stairway landing. Not a single Ansel Adams print on display anywhere.

--Darin

This is consistent with my visits of top-level museums and galleries here in Canada. Photography is relegated to the traveling, temporary, special exhibits section, and what little photography there is is not landscapes. Except for when I traveled just to see Ansel and Salgado in Toronto, I have not seen a landscape photograph in a museum in some years. I think there may have been a couple in one traveling exhibit of very early French photographers, but memory is failing me.

Kirk Grittings pointed out to me that many Canadian museums own Burtynsky prints, and that may be so; they are not on display though.

[Mark Sampson]

Well, I'm lucky. I grew up (more or less) at the George Eastman House and can't remember everything I've seen there. Now I live in DC and there's all kinds of work to see, Muybridge to Winogrand to Lewis Baltz. But I take your point- photography is still a 'red-headed stepchild' to the art world, and that won't change in our lifetimes. But I've learned a lot from, and enjoyed a great deal of, the paintings and sculpture the art museums seem to prefer. We as photographers can all learn from all the artists, not just the photographers.

[Kirk Gittings]

The Denver Art Museum had a huge retrospective of Robert Adams two years ago with hundreds of images and an accompanying 3 volume set of books. Last year the Phoenix Museum and the Santa Fe Museum of Art hosted a huge show of William Clift with the big book and this year the photo curator, Katherine Ware, hosted the year of photography, pulling a lot of work from the permanent collection. In Chicago this summer at the AIC the Koudelka show was stunning as was the Vivian Mayer show at the Harold Washington Library.

In my travels I have been very pleased with what I have seen with some of the best shows I have seen in my entire life but I plan my trips to a large degree to see photography shows rather than playing it hit or miss.

[Kirk Gittings]

The Art Institute of Chicago has a permanent gallery, but I think everyone misses it because it's a hallway.

There is a difference between a permanent gallery and exhibiting work from the permanent collection. The OP is not clear on this point. At the Art Institute of Chicago most of the work displayed is from the permanent collection though it may not be up permanently nor should it as their permanent collection is enormous.

[Darin Boville]

>>but I plan my trips to a large degree to see photography shows rather than playing it hit or miss.<<

That would, of course, be the very definition of a biased sample.

--Darin