Exploring Photography: Works from the Permanent Collection

Exploring Photography highlights over 40 works from the collection of the LSU Museum of Art by photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Edward Weston, Ruth Bernhard, Judy Dater and Louisiana’s own Clarence John Laughlin, Richard Sexton, Debbie Fleming Caffery, and Thomas Neff. The exhibition reflects the photographic holdings of the Museum, which have doubled in the past year, and celebrates the range of photography’s possibilities. These new acquisitions enrich and broaden the focus of the collection in terms of subject matter, medium, and chronology.

Themes/subjects found elsewhere in our collections are paralleled in Exploring Photography. Portraits range from the powerful studio images of the famous by Yousuf Karsh to the marginalized subjects of Diane Arbus to the constructed double images by Nancy Webber and Bonnie Schiffman. Landscapes presented are as different in style and tone as a megalith by Paul Caponigro, constructed digital images of a scene from a porch by Robert Fichter, the black-and-white and color images of Robert von Sternberg, or the surreal dream-spaces of Jerry Uelsmann and the abstracted image of the land by Barry Anderson or Henry Gilpin.

Works in the Museum’s collection from the early1900s are joined with works as recent as 2012. Mediums as varied as traditional gelatin silver prints, archival digital prints, scanograms and xeroradiography, ultrachrome color images, and gum pigment and cyanotype and solvent transfer photo-based images are represented.

Exploring Photography celebrates the power of photography. The variety represented in the Museum’s photography holdings expands our ability to share the importance of photographic image making and makers.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website