The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography

The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But these familiar trappings of everyday life will be, at times, unrecognizable—so altered by the camera as to constitute something entirely new. 

Enticing consumers with increasingly experimental approaches to the still life genre, the photographs featured transform everyday objects into covetable commodities. The camera abstracts them from functional use, at times distorting them through dizzying perspectives and modulations of scale. 

Spanning the first century of photographic advertising, the exhibition will illustrate how commercial camerawork contributed to the visual language of modernism, suggesting new links between the promotional strategies of vernacular studios and the tactics of the interwar avant-garde. Corporate commissions by celebrated innovators, including Paul Outerbridge, August Sander, and Piet Zwart, will appear alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications, united by a common cause: to snatch the ordinary out of context, and sell it back at full price.

Credit: Overview from museum website