The Itinerant Languages of Photography
The Princeton Art Museum is presenting The Itinerant Languages of Photography, an exhibition featuring ninety four objects by forty artists, including some samplings of video. These artists and works provide an overview of the history of photography since its origins to the present, articulated around four topics: "Itinerant Photographs," "Itinerant Revolutions," "Itinerant Subjects," and "Itinerant Archives." The exhibition is the result of a three-year interdisciplinary project sponsored by Princeton University's Council for International Teaching and Research, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalog. The nucleus of The Itinerant Languages of Photography focuses on how context alters the perception of photographs, moreover when they belong to such diverse eras as the Nineteenth or Twentieth centuries, or our own fully digital moment.
This group exhibition featuring highly significant figures in the photographic discipline is rich and varied in images, less anthropological than other comparable shows, and includes both widely circulated and less known works. Among the artists selected for the exhibition are : José Medeiros, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Pierre Verger, Manuel Alvárez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Breson, Miguel Casasola, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, Enrique Bostelmann, Graciela Iturbide, José Hernández-Claire, Nacho López, Pedro Meyer, Joan Colom, Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, Joan Fontcuberta, Marcelo Brodsky, RES, and Rosángela Rennó. The curators are Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzilles from the Latin American Studies Program, and Catherine Bussard, the Peter C. Bunnell Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum.
The works on exhibit were facilitated by institutional funds, private collections, and artists from Brazil, Mexico, the US, Spain, and Argentina. Among these institutions are the D, Thereza Christina Maria Collection, the National library Foundation Archive, and the Moreira Salles Institute, from Brazil; from the United States, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Princeton University Marquand Art and Archaeology Library, the University of Arizona Creative Photography Center's Lola Álvarez Archive, and New York's Museum of Modern Art; from Mexico, Fondo Casasola, INAH's SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional, and Universidad Panamericana's González Garza Archive. Barcelona's Foto Colectania Collection also contributed works for the exhibition.
One highlight in the comparative interweaving of the images is a trilogy of shots from the 1980s, in photographs by Susan Meiselas, Graciela Iturbide, and Eduardo Gil, from the United States, Mexico, and Argentina, respectively. These artists refer to different situations, silhouetted, in Buenos Aires, East L.A., and El Salvador. Landscape, human figures in multitude or singularity, historical scenes and characters intercalated with anonymous individuals, are all options in an exhibition that can be visited through January 19th, 2014.
