AT extended labels part B FINAL 1.11.16 2pmuseumguide.sfmoma.org/wp...Time_extended-labels-pt... · Dijkstra’s use of large-format negatives allows her to meticulously depict the

Eugène AtgetFrench, 1857–1927

Décrotteur (Boot Cleaner)1899Printing- out paper print

Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust

After failing as a theater actor, Atget took up photography. Most likely self- taught, he turned his lens on Paris, recording the old architecture of a rapidly modernizing city. He marketed his pictures as “documents for artists,” intending them as source imagery for painters and set designers. Though he favored architectural studies, one of his earliest series was of the petits métiers (small trades): men and women who carried out menial tasks on the city streets, such as the boot cleaner seen here. The thou-sands of pictures Atget made form a remarkable historical archive of a now nearly unrecognizable Paris.

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Nancy BursonAmerican, born 1948

Five Self- Portraits at Ages 18, 30, 45, 60, and 701976Gelatin silver prints

Collection of the Pilara Foundation, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Burson was only twenty- eight when she made this group of self- portraits. Starting with a real picture of herself at eighteen and then transforming her appearance through clothes and makeup, she imag-ined and documented her own future likeness. Such pictures can be seen as analog precursors to her pio-neering digital work: the year she made this series she also began collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce computer- generated “aged” photographs, a technique that was later adopted by the FBI to help locate missing children. Burson’s work, both analog and digital, probes the limits of photographic truth and uses technology to great psychological effect.


Moyra DaveyCanadian, born 1958

Copperhead #11990Chromogenic print

Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2010

In the wake of the financial crisis of 1987, Davey turned her attention to the lowliest form of American currency: the penny. The titles of the works in this series refer to both an anachronistic name for the coin, which used to be made of solid copper, and the name of a political faction that opposed President Abraham Lincoln’s policies during the Civil War. Davey’s close- range examinations document the smoothed surfaces and scratches these pennies have accumulated as they have passed through countless hands over time. Their physical conditions serve as intimate and tactile analogues for the far more abstract system of global economic exchange.


Rineke DijkstraDutch, born 1959

Vila Franca, Portugal, May 8, 1994, A1994Chromogenic print

Gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein, 2000

Dijkstra’s arresting portraits explore moments of transition. Whether images of adolescents on the cusp of adulthood or recent army inductees, her pic-tures are imbued with the anticipation of imminent change. In the series on view here, the pivotal event has already taken place: the bullfighters posed for her immediately after exiting the ring. Dijkstra’s use of large- format negatives allows her to meticulously depict the physical effects of her subjects’ brutal encounters; her decision to capture their unwavering gazes close up, against neutral backgrounds, ampli-fies their state of psychological exhaustion.


Peter Henry EmersonEnglish, born Cuba, 1856–1936

Poling the Marsh Hay, from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads1886Platinum print

Fractional and promised gift of Murray Huneke

Emerson was an early advocate for photography’s status as a fine art. In 1886 he published Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, a study of rural England that celebrated the dignity of manual labor and documented a way of life that was rapidly dis-appearing in an age of increasing industrialization and urbanization. This is one of his bleaker images: reapers carrying their heavy load of wet and ruined hay against a forbidding, wintry sky. It has been remarked that their pose recalls that of pallbearers.

Campaign for Art


Paul GrahamEnglish, born 1956

Fulton Street, 11th November 2009, 11.29.10 a.m.2009Inkjet prints

Purchase through the gifts of Randi and Bob Fisher, Nion McEvoy, and the Accessions Committee Fund, 2012

Graham once described photography’s essential activity as “nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself.” Turning conven-tional street photography on its head, he presents not one iconic image, but two—or sometimes three—taken at the same scene, mere moments apart. In pictures such as those seen here, a minor drama has taken place in the split second between frames. In others, very little happens at all. Presented in pairs and triads, the juxtapositions both confuse and clarify. Graham reminds us that history is a subjective narra-tive, full of gaps, and that photographic truth is not absolute, but contingent.


Idris KhanEnglish, born 1978

every . . . Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters2004Chromogenic print

Collection of the Pilara Foundation, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Khan created this image by scanning and digitally layering all twenty- nine photographs that were part of Nicholas Nixon’s iconic ongoing portrait series The Brown Sisters (on view in this gallery) in 2004. The resulting picture is no longer a representation of Nixon’s wife and her sisters but rather a dizzying field of information in which recognizable features emerge and then disappear into chaos. By com-pressing decades of photographs into a single frame, Khan obliterates the chronological narrative of Nixon’s carefully sequenced project, giving a new, abstract visual form to the passage of time and the accumula-tion of memory.


Owen KyddCanadian, born 1975

Composition, Warner Studio (on green)2012Video on digital display

Foto Forum purchase, 2015

For a long time making photographs and making videos were entirely separate activities. In the last two decades, with the appearance of cameras that could toggle between still and video modes, the ideological line dividing these mediums has become much less tautly drawn. Kydd probes their boundaries, creating short, looping video installations that he calls “dura-tional photographs.” Tied neither to the narrative arc of cinema nor to the “decisive moment” of photogra-phy, these works exist in a liminal state of temporality. Here Kydd’s chosen subject—a black plastic garbage bag flapping gently, seductively, in the breeze—is res-olutely of its moment, a contemporary object of the everyday.


George LegradyCanadian American, born Hungary, 1950

At the Table, from the series Refraction2011Lenticular photograph


Legrady uses the destabilizing effects of lenticular imaging to collapse time and explore the relationships between photography, technology, and memory. Here he digitally interlaces three shots he made at a ball for Hungarian immigrants in 1972, some forty years prior, to create a single, layered, almost three- dimensional picture. Printed on the back of a special, finely ridged plastic, the image is in a constant state of flux, changing with each shift of the viewer’s body. Deeply influenced by film, the artist pushes cinematic narrative into a dreamlike fugue.


Zoe LeonardAmerican, born 1961

TV VCR2006Dye transfer print

Purchase through a gift of the Art Supporting Foundation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Nion McEvoy, Kate and Wes Mitchell, and the Accessions Committee Fund, 2015

Watching the gentrification of her downtown New York neighborhood, Leonard was inspired to document the replacement of local shops and hand- painted signs with the sleek storefronts and recognizable brands of large chains. Using a medium- format Rolleiflex camera and color film—technology that is itself almost obsolete—she recorded the changing face of the city. The project, which com-prises thousands of negatives and lasted a decade, expanded to Africa, Asia, and Latin America to trace the international circulation of American consumer goods. Leonard both pays tribute to the archival projects of nineteenth and early twentieth- century photography and laments the impact of technological change and globalization.


Trevor PaglenAmerican, born 1974

KEYHOLE- IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite, USA 186)2008Chromogenic print


Paglen’s hours- long exposure of the night sky over Yosemite’s Half Dome evokes the monumentality of geological time and the sublime unknowability of the universe. The bright lines that streak past the iconic peak are not only traces of starlight but also trails of a U.S. reconnaissance satellite. Using data compiled by amateurs and a computer- guided telescope, Paglen precisely tracked the orbit of the classified satellite and recorded its transit with his camera. His beautiful but disturbing work marries a long history of landscape photography in the American West with a decidedly contemporary interest in the visual representation of the information age.


Matthew PillsburyAmerican, born France, 1973

Philippa Rizopoulos and George Spencer, “Law & Order,” Wednesday, November 6th, 2002, 10–11 p.m.2002Inkjet print

Purchase through a gift of Mary and Thomas Field, 2004

This intimate bedroom scene is illuminated entirely by the light of the television. Using an hour- long expo-sure (the length of the TV episode documented in the title), Pillsbury recorded both the otherworldly glow of the screen and the ghostly traces of his sub-jects’ subtle movements as they watched the show. Inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s elegant views of movie theaters (such as the one hanging nearby), Pillsbury’s work focuses on the stages on which more mundane dramas play out, exploring the temporality of the everyday and the ubiquity of screens in contem-porary life.


Alison RossiterAmerican, born 1953

Eastman Kodak Azo Hard C Grade, expired November 1917, processed 2010 (#1)2010Gelatin silver print


Rossiter trolls online auctions to find photographic papers from the early twentieth century. By selec-tively dipping these papers—now long past their sell- by dates—in developer or pouring it over them in streams, she creates camera- less compositions in a purely photographic palette. The idiosyncrasies of each sheet give rise to unpredictable imagery: frequently, latent traces of previous owners (fingerprints) or poor storage conditions (mold) emerge, revealing hauntings of the paper’s past. Rossiter has described the process as “coax[ing] images out of these long- forgotten papers”—less an act of artistic creation than one of restitution.


Shimpei TakedaJapanese, born 1982

Trace #9, Asaka Kuni- tsuko Shrine 2013Gelatin silver print


Takeda was born outside Fukushima, Japan, which was the site of a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in 2011. Living in New York at the time, he returned to his homeland to collect soil from around the nuclear plant, now contaminated with radioactivity. Takeda chose to draw from places that to him evoked life and death: a temple, a histori-cal battlefield, his own birthplace. He then packaged each soil sample with a sheet of photographic paper for a month. The resulting time- lapse images are photograms produced by the action of the radiation itself, though they more powerfully evoke starry night skies than the ominous forces that created them.


Unknown

Untitled [Postmortem portrait]n.d.Daguerreotype

Gift of Gordon L. Bennett, 2004

Though the custom of photographing the dead may seem gruesome, in the nineteenth century it was a widely embraced part of the mourning process. With life expectancies shorter and child mortality higher, the deathbed often presented the first opportunity to preserve a loved one’s likeness. Photographers essentially co- opted the tradition of mourning paintings, but the uncanny verisimilitude of the medium endowed its images with a particu-lar sense of immediacy. In most cases subjects were posed as if merely asleep, as seen here. Over time funereal and photographic rituals changed; postmor-tem portraiture had largely disappeared by the end of World War I.


Documents

AT extended labels part B FINAL 1.11.16 2pmuseumguide.sfmoma.org/wp...Time_extended-labels-pt... · Dijkstra’s use of large-format negatives allows her to meticulously depict the