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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301Oct. 20, 2000
CONTACT: Ruta Smithson (609) 258-3763
Photography Exhibition Explores Theme of Survival
Exhibition Dates: October 17 through November 19, 2000
PRINCETON -- An exhibition that explores the relationship between survival and photography entitled "Surviving the Photograph" is on view at The Art Museum, Princeton University, through November 19, 2000. The exhibition was organized by Department of Art and Archaeology graduate students Andrew Hershberger and Marta Weiss in conjunction with a two-day conference on the subject October 21 and 22 sponsored by the Princeton University Graduate School.
The thirty-nine photographs exhibited, drawn from the Museum's comprehensive permanent collection and spanning the history of the medium, address the theme of survival directly through the subject matter -- famine, war, AIDS, or death. They also demonstrate more conceptual manifestations of the theme.
Writers from Honoré de Balzac to Roland Barthes have contemplated the connection between photography and death. The theorist André Bazin argued that photography's origins may be traced to a "mummy complex." In its potential for highly accurate representation, photography, like the ancient Egyptian burial practice, fulfills a need to preserve its subject. Where Bazin found the desire for eternal life, however, Susan Sontag has located the love of violence and death, comparing the act of making a photograph to a "sublimated murder." While a photographic portrait may survive after the sitter's demise, the capacity for immortalization through photography can be a reminder of the subject's and viewer's mortality. A photograph, commonly understood to capture or freeze a moment, may even be seen to prefigure death; it can preserve or destroy, promise survival or threaten death.
In the photographs exhibited, three conceptual agents -- photographer, subject, and medium -- play off each other, creating a variety of tensions. The exhibition traces four patterns of this struggle, beginning with images in which the photographer, in collaboration with the subject, wrestles with the medium, seeking to make a truthful or insightful representation. A second manifestation of the theme appears in images whose shocking or intense subjects eclipse the presence of the photographer and even photography itself. In the third category, the photographer and photograph seem to violate or overwhelm the subject. Techniques such as cropping or blurring transform, or even erase, the subject. Finally, completing the cycle of threat and vulnerability, the exhibition includes works in which the photographer lashes out and even attempts to destroy the subject and medium.
The artists represented in the exhibition include Thomas Barrow, Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, Maxime DuCamp, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Lee Friedlander, Emmet Gowin, Eikoh Hosoe, Bill Jacobson, Michiko Kon, Richard Misrach, August Sander, Fazal Sheikh, Otto Steinert, and Shomei Tomatsu.
The Art Museum is open to the public without charge. Free highlights tours of the collection are given every Saturday at 2:00 p.m. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and on Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. It is closed on Monday and major holidays. The Museum Shop closes at 5:00 p.m. The Museum is located in the middle of the Princeton University campus. Picasso's large sculpture Head of a Woman stands in front. For further information, please call (609) 258-3788.
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