Clyfford Still & Photography

Photography played a distinctive and under-appreciated role in Clyfford Still’s biography and work. Clyfford Still & Photography is the first exhibition to explore this subject in depth and from different historical and critical perspectives. Nearly 70 photos from the Clyfford Still Archives (which holds some 23,000 photographic images) ranging in date from 1905 until the mid-1970s are included in the exhibition, along with six comparative paintings and other related archival materials such as photography books, magazine clippings, and ephemera.

Photographs intersected with Still’s life on diverse levels, ranging from photographs he took in the 1930s as reference points for various paintings and works on paper to those that privately bear witness to a more intimate side: Still’s evolution from soon after his birth in 1904 to the final years before his death in 1980. Archival photographs also provide the sole remaining traces of artworks by Still that have otherwise been lost to posterity. Finally, certain landscape photographs from Still’s concluding two decades in Maryland exhibit a striking beauty and sometimes evoke paintings done many years before. Despite their uncertain authorship, these images (discovered within his personal archive) bear the vital stamp of Still’s creative spirit. When examined in totality, the objects illustrate what amounts to a life in pictures.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.