Landscape photography: dead and forgotten at art museums?

There's one sense in which I feel very lucky to be interested in photography and working a block away from the Chicago museum for the last 30 years: I've long ago stopped walking through the painting galleries--nothing changes from year to year there. They have a lot of space, true, but it hardly ever changes, and that gets old fast.

However, there are, with the newer modern wing, two photo galleries dedicated to constant rotations of good shows (presently the Koudelka stuff and the Steichen show, which I happen to really like and have seen three times now). The museum's big rotating space shows the blockbuster shows that are uneven interest to me and not always paint-centric (currently Magritte), but the other "minor" arts are also served well with rotating shows--a great drawing show just closed and I haven't been over to see the new one, which is promising, and there's a weaving show rotated in at the moment, along with a temporary gallery of ancient Greek art in Egypt.

So sure, the paintings take up a lot of space and get the orderly presentation through history, but the meat of the place is the regularly changing shows outside of the painting category. In that sense, the fans of, for instance, Renaissance painting actually are getting the short end of the stick, having had to look at the same couple of rooms virtually unchanged for the last 30 years, at least, with, I don't think, hardly any special exhibits at all.

Visitors need also to be aware of the Gage photo gallery (Roosevelt University's social documentary gallery-- http://www.roosevelt.edu/gagegallery.aspx ), about a block north of the Art Institute, and Columbia College's wonderful Museum of Contemporary Photography ( http://www.mocp.org/ ), three or four blocks south, also on Michigan Ave.

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Originally Posted by 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

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Yes but yours is a very narrow slice of time sample which doesn't really represent much either except a totally random choice of dates. next year you might get very different examples. You should do this every year for the next 20 and see what you get. :)

For those in the Los Angeles area or visiting, the Huntington Library has an Edward Weston landscape exhibit going on now.

http://huntington.org/WebAssets/Temp....aspx?id=15675

Press release

For the first year after the July opening, a new room devoted to photographs will display a rotation of examples from The Huntington’s collection of work by Edward Weston. The giant of modernist photography selected and printed for The Huntington 500 pictures concentrating on images that he had shot between 1937 and 1939, when he was on a Guggenheim grant. The installation will focus on some of his finest landscapes of California and the West.

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Originally Posted by Darin Boville

I just got back from a cross-country trip, coast of California to NYC and back by FJ. Forty-two days on the road and I hit a lot of art museums (Denver Art Museum, Museum of Nebraska Art, Nelsen-Atkins, St. Louis Art Museum, Detroit Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, and the Chicago Institute of Art). At each Museum I saw every exhibit, usually there from opening to close. (Not counting the Met. I was there all day and barely scratched the surface.)

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

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Wasn't there already a huge thread with this exact topic a few weeks ago?

What's the surprise - photography isen't art, that's why it is not in an ART museums permanent collection, but it is there in a temp show, when some money is poured over it, or a new canonical art history text examines the place of photography in the art world (or was it art's place in the age of mechanical reproduction?).

Some artists use photography as their pencil of choice, but "straight" landscape work is old and boring, and has little to do with art on most cases, hence it's absence in the above structure.

This is old news, as old as photography, which is not really very old at all, and only entered in to this discussion about art not so long ago.

Whose culture is represented by the artists you did see on your trip? Much Modern Art I've seen in museums is contrived--if it exists outside of museums it is tolerated by a culture, such as selected by an architect for a shopping mall, not embraced by it.
Landscape photography seen as Art has a deep cultural element on the personal level. It serves as a dream, or perhaps a reminder, of somewhere else in the world that has a connection somehow with the viewer. A really noteworthy landscape would, like a painting, have a common connection with a great many viewers and admittedly those are fewer and far between.
Photography exhibits in museums and galleries I've noticed tend to be concerned with common themes, seldom the landscape.
But that doesn't mean the Landscape is dead.
Where Landscape photography truly lives as "Art" is on the desk or walls in your own home or office, an image maybe you shot yourself on a beach last Summer, or perhaps a spared and framed leaf from an Ansel Adams calendar.
That makes that particular landscape a piece of your own "cultural archive."

Of course, there is the Dorothea Lange collection at Oakland Museum....not really landscape...but, it is more or less a permanent photo exhibit. They also have an interesting (temporary) exhibit coming in September.

Every alleged "art" museum around here has tons of photography in their permanent collections, and photography routinely on display as well. But often there seems to be a big gap between vintage works, or at least stuff already half a century back, and all the shock value or zippy-zappy current interactive stuff, or blatant digital-schmigital novelties printed as big as billboards, and probably trashed the week after the exhibit unless somebody with big enough walls "invests" in it. It's either one extreme or another. Not much elbow room for true variety. But hasn't that always been a bit of the trend? You're either already dead and beatified,or doing something ostentatious or outrageous to attract attention. With me, it's predictable enough to ignore paying for museum memberships, though I do get out from time to time for shows that particularly interest me. And when something gets outright advertised, no way I'm going to buy an expensive ticket just to stand in a long line to get herded past some famous impressionists paintings, for example. I'd rather travel to where some of these kinds of things are on permanent display and take my time enjoying them.

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Originally Posted by Mark Sampson

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.

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Well stated. That has also been my experience.

Thanks.

I'm not sure why traveling or short term exhibits are somehow less regarded than permanent exhibits of photography.

It's kinda a moot point with me anyway. In this part of the world I've seen so much classic photography here and there that a museum show isn't all that big a deal. Yeah, maybe somebody like Atget, who doesn't reach the West Coast often, and frankly looks better in a book, because lots of his original prints are in horrible shape. I never saw an actual AA print in my life until I just walked around the corner from one of my own early gallery gigs right in his own town. Everywhere. Brett Weston simply walked in. Now that guy could print! I had already seen a number of Edward Weston prints in private collections over the years. They certainly weren't either as rare or as obscenely expensive as today. Lot and lots of classic names I could mention. It was everywhere, at least in terms of anything that might be loosely classified as the West Coast School. Heck, the son in law of one of those guys just walked in here, just like he does almost every day. I get a lot of lore second hand. Interesting. But I'd rather just be printing my own work than looking at someone else's. There a time and place for each
aspect of the experience.