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*** I will be giving a presentation on my work Thursday, October 2, 6 p.m at the Museum.

Contemporary Photographers, Traditional Practices: Vision and Method in the 21st Century

October 2nd to November 22, 2014
Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University

The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University enters its second decade this year with a fall exhibition celebrating photography. In collaboration with the Schmidt-Dean Gallery in Philadelphia, the museum presents an eclectic exhibition of thirteen contemporary photographers represented by the gallery, all of whom enjoy regional and national reputations. Curated by Schmidt-Dean Gallery director Christopher Schmidt, the exhibition features a wide range of both technical and conceptual approaches. Included are historical procedures such as the tintype, cyanotype and gum-bichromate process; alternative techniques such as pinhole and hand painting; and more traditional methods in both analog and digital. Throughout, these various approaches are applied to a wide range of subjects and ideas.

One of 3 incredible shows now up at MOMA. A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio is a text book clinic on how to hang a wide ranging thematic exhibition. On any one wall you can scan decades of work zeroing in on a particular studio practices with ideas ranging from the photographic object to the  studio as stage or laboratory. This exhibition will teach you more about photography than just about any other I can think of in the last decade.

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio February 8–October 5, 2014 @ MOMA

Francis Bruguière. Light Abstraction. c. 1925. Gelatin silver print, 9 15/16 x 7 15/16″ (25.2 x 20.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Arnold Newman © 1991 Kenneth H. Bruguière and Kathleen
Bruguière Anderson

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and other artists using photography have worked and experimented within their studios, from photography’s inception to the present. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own brings together photographs, films, and videos by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.

Depending on the period, the cultural or political context, and the commercial, artistic, or scientific motivations of the artist, the studio might be a haven, a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. For more than a century, photographers have dealt with the spaces of their studios in strikingly diverse and inventive ways: from using composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to putting their subjects against neutral backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton) to playful, amateurish experimentation (Roman Signer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss). A World of Its Own offers another history of photography—a photography created within the walls of the studio, and yet as innovative as its more extroverted counterpart, street photography. via MoMA

Back in 1999 Hiroshi Sugimoto made a very large set of images depicting The Last Supper, which were photographs of wax models from a wax museum based on Di Vinci’s famous painting. (He did an entire series of portraits of wax models called Portraits and this work is from that series). This particular piece was in storage in a basement in New York when hurricane Sandy hit. The piece was severely damaged by the waters in the flooded basement. Instead of destroying the work Sugimoto has deemed it an act of God and is selling as such with a new title: The Last Supper: Acts of God now showing at the Fraenkel Gallery.

When god is your partner in making an artwork how can you go wrong in turning what is actually a destroyed work into an even more collectable piece? I will let you be the judge….

“I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time”. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto 

Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Last Supper: Acts of God, 1999/2012. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The Last Supper: Acts of God (detail), 1999/2012 © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery,

Hiroshi Sugimoto and The Last Supper.  All photos and quotes via the Fraenkel Gallery.