CBS 2 At The Met

CBS 2 At The Met: Framing A Century

NEW YORK (CBS) ― The spotlight here is on the first 100 years of photography, and thirteen Master Photographers who helped make the medium a legitimate art form. Museum visitors will see ten to twelve examples, including works by Gustave Le Gray, Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, and Man Ray, all from the Met's permanent collection.

Curator Malcolm Daniel told CBS 2's Dana Tyler he had plenty of landscapes, portraits, and contemporary pictures to chose from.

Daniel said, "One of the goals of the exhibition is to show the breath of expression in each of these photographers. Not to just show one moment or one subject in their career but to show what they did over the course of time and their full artistic expression. You don't get to see the whole career of an artist unless it's an entire exhibition devoted to a photographer. In this case, we got to tell the history, give some breath of work by individual photographers, but also have a dozen different photographers who want to look at and compare and see the course of history."

It wasn't easy taking pictures in the mid -19th century. It was an imperfect craft, chemicals and exposures made photography more like a science experiment. Visitors will see how two photographers, Gustave Le Gray in France, and Roger Fenton in England, tackled landscapes in the 1850's.

Curator Daniel compared the two photographs. "I call more of a cloudscape than a landscape, he's (Fenton) pushed the horizon down to the very bottom of the picture, he's exposed his negative for the clouds rather than the land. I think that what he's trying to do is show how small our world is, how small we are and that when one looks at the expanse of the heavens, one feels an emotional sense, a sense of the sublime."

He continued. "Compared to what Gustave Le Gray did, his is a picture that's full of theater, full of drama, you can imagine all the instruments of the orchestra playing at once, the crashing waves, the dramatic clouds!"

Julia Margaret Cameron discovered photography relatively late in life. 
Remember this was the mid-1800's, he was 40 when she got her first camera, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. Daniel explained, "She took it up with a great passion and great seriousness, making the most compelling portraits that have ever been made in photography. She was an educated woman. She was interested in art, and she was friends with many of the great literary figures, philosophers. While many of the portraits of men are people who were famous, like the poet Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, the pictures of women are often relatives of hers, neighbors, or even household servants who are enlisted in the photographic projects!"

The show's focus takes a contemporary turn with American artist Man Ray, who, according to Curator Malcolm Daniel, did some of his most exciting work in Paris. Daniel continued. "He also had a very experimental sense of what the medium could do and what constituted an image that could be art. Here, in addition to placing some kind of object over the photographic paper, he's also played with the photographic chemistry...We don't know whether we're looking at the Big Bang or what. But, it's of course taking abstraction into a medium but it's usually considered to be bound by visual reality. It's an exciting development in photography in the mid 1920's."

"Framing A Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940," is on display until September 1.

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