moments in
TIME
Photography exhibit explores images of
modern people
By Ryan Bachman
Photographers from across the globe and throughout the 20th century present a time table of culture and technology.
The Center for Visual Arts, 1701 Wazee St., is presenting the exhibition, The Human Experience: 20th Century Photography, an exploration of the inclusion of people in photographic images from the turn of the century to the present. The show runs through April 22.
Curated by noted Denver photographer and art historian, James O. Milmore, The Human Experience was assembled from the collections of various artists, individuals, galleries and museums. The pieces in the exhibition are the works of already recognized as well as emerging artists from the United States, Russia, Africa and throughout Europe.
The photographs in The Human Experience reveal movements in the progression from pictorialism to the digital imagery of today.
Documentary and photojournalism hang along side portrait and fashion photography, modernist and war photography, street photography and post-modern.
Early photographic artists emulated painters using soft focus to create impressionistic images. The potential of photography was soon realized. Improved publishing of books and magazines brought fine photography to a widening audience. The publicâs insatiable appetite for images assured the future of photography.
ãExploring the human experience through photography offers a wide variety of subjects and treatments from formal to casual, creative and experimental, journalistic and abstract,ä said Milmore, who has photos, including prints of Louie Armstrong, in the show. ãViewers will see warriors and women, old and young, men and children, cowboys and Indians, sadness and joy.ä
Some of the images in the exhibit are well-known and appraised classics such as American/Canadian Yousuf Karshâs portraits of Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway capturing the most noteworthy figures and immortalizing them into someone completely recognizable to later generations.
Also on display is the April 1952 cover of Life magazine featuring Marilyn Monroe photo taken by Phillipe Halsman. Included is the print the cover was taken from, giving the viewer a look at the pre-airbrushed image revealing a safety pin in her dress and other details not seen on the magazine.
There are also many works by prominent photographers not widely shown before, especially the Russians. Russian photographer Yevgeni Khaldai captured his image of war-repressed Europe in 1945. His piece, Budapest Ghetto depicts a middle-aged man and woman standing alone in a street amid desolation and hopelessness. Also by Khaldai is Returning Home: Murmansk, a picture of two wayward refugees returning to neighborhood completely bombed out with only chimneys of the houses standing.
Another Russian photographer exhibited is Vlaimir Sioman whose pieces Bathing and The Chase were both of inmates at a sanitarium.
Garry Winogrand began his photographic studies in the 1960âs in very much the same tradition, taking candid, irritatingly banal photos of everyday street activity. The show features work from Winograndâs Women are Beautiful portfolio.
Also working in the realm of street photography Robert Chamberlinâs 1966 work Alm Boy Dukes, an at ease look of the old Oakland, Calif. gang. Also by Chamberlin is Sausalito Bust, a look at 1966 hippies being hassled out of a staircase by a cop.
The exhibit also features modernism photography and a series piece by New York artist Duane Michals. The Bogeyman, shot by Michals in 1971 features a young girl inspecting a hanging hat and raincoat only to be surprised when a body takes shape and carries her off.
In the same experimental vein is Joan Baker Paulâs Fire Remmant pieces. If Kansas Goes and Two Dancers are both pictures of other pictures that were actually burned in a fire.
