CBS 2 At The Met

CBS 2 At The Met: Photography

NEW YORK (CBS) ― The family photo album is changing fast with the times. Visitors will see more than forty years worth of kodak moments at the Met's special exhibition "Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960."

Thirty works in all are set up in the museum's Gallery for Contemporary Photographs. Assistant Curator Doug Eklund told CBS 2's Dana tyler how this show turns the camera lens on some high-tech innovations that have taken snapshots from the times of your life into the 21st century.

He said, "This exhibition is really the fact that photography is going through one of its epic periodic changes from analog, which is the old-fashioned cameras where you made a negative and then from that negative you could make an infinite number of prints, to digital photography The whole show taken as a kind of sum is really looking at where photography is right now. Sort of on the cutting edge."

It's also decidedly digital. A new kind of family portrait is here, call these guys photographic sculptures. Eklund explained, "These were actually made using a digital camera in the round and the kind of camera that this artist used, her name is Karen Sander, it's a the kind of camera that moves around the subject and is used for fitting clothes on a person."

Along a wall visitors will recognize black and white photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, made famous in the 1970's by the original stalkerazzi photographer Ron Galella, right?

Not so according to Eklund. "It's actually by Lutz Bacher, who's a woman artist who has appropriated or stolen from a book of Ron Galella's, where he's telling this famous story of how he caught Jackie Onassis in the park and chased after her and he decided that she wanted to be chased. So it's all about following, you know, So this woman artist is stealing back from the male artist this kind of chase of Jackie.

There's another famous face. But is a 2001 portrait of Fidel Castro, who resigned as Cuban's President in February an illusion or reality? Eklund had the answer. "This is a picture of a wax figure of Fidel Castro from Madame Toussaud's and it's made by a Japanese photographer named Hiroshi Sugimoto, who made a whole series of these figures in the wax museum!"

Museum visitors will recognize the slide projector. German born- Japanese artist Kota Ezawa updated the 60's icon in his work "History of Photography Remix."

Eklund said, "So they're actually drawings made on the computer and then they're outputted like old-fashioned slides and projected. So, what we're seeing is a kind of interpretation by the artist of images that we all know. And what he's making-- the point that he's making is that we all see images differently. We all may know a photograph, but the photograph I'm seeing in my head is different than the one that you're seeing in your head."

"Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960" is on display until October 19th.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

---