An icy-calm Merced River lined by evergreens leads the eye to the snow-covered Half Dome in Ansel Adams’ 1938 black-and-white of Yosemite’s picturesque granite formation.
The image is a highlight of The Big Picture: Photography’s Moment at Nassau County Museum of Art on Long Island, an exhibition that encourages visitors to consider Adams’ gorgeous framing as something akin to, say, Albert Bierstadat’s painting of the same vista. The exhibit unites the work of Adams, Dorothy Lang, Lewis Hine, Robert Capa and other pioneers of 20th-century American photography under the theme that photography is a form of art.
“The acclaim they earned for capturing the world at shutter speed reached new heights of artistic truth-telling,” reads a sign on entering the exhibit.
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz spearheaded a movement to have his medium deemed deserving of artistic status with sculptures and paintings. His turn-of-the-century sepia snapshot of a Manhattan street corner, perhaps inspired by an Impressionist painting of a Parisian boulevard, hangs in the main gallery with Adams’ image. Facing Stieglitz’s snapshot is a still-life-like conceptual photo by his protege, Berenice Abbott, titled Parallax View.
Lange’s photo of a distressed migrant worker and her young children in California taken during the Great Depression, an image featured in books of history’s most famous photographs, is centrally placed in the main gallery, perhaps drawing comparisons to painted portraits. Alongside this image is Lewis Hine’s iconic shot of a gravity-defying laborer perched on a high beam of the Empire State Building under construction in the early 1930s.
“Lewis Hine climbed the girders of the Empire State Building as it topped out to get a breathtaking shot of a steelworker signaling his rigger more than a thousand feet below on Fifth Avenue,” a sign states about the photographer who documented working conditions in America.
More death-defying was Capa’s snapshot taken from behind U.S. troops storming the shores of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, another highly profiled photo taken from a series called The Magnificent Eleven.
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”
The Big Picture features many other photographers from the golden age of black-and-white imagery and beyond, including Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Man Ray, whose portrait of French fashion designer Coco Chanel graces a side gallery wall. Other galleries feature the colorful, large-formatted work of more contemporary American and international photographers, including Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Sarah Charlesworth, Lalla Essaydi, Christian Boltanski and Gregory Crewdson.
When contemplating German-born photographer Michael Wolfe’s “Transparent City,” a nighttime shot of a building with men working in well-lit offices on successive floors, circa 2007, one may consider such a creative composition as more than just a coincidental journalistic capture.
The exhibit also features a series of sepia photos, by unknown photographers, of black Americans posing proudly as automobile owners in the 1920s, as well as glass cases displaying cameras, stereoscopes and other photographic equipment from decades and centuries past.
Whether The Big Picture persuades visitors that photography is fundamentally like a painter's recreation of reality, the exhibit is nevertheless an impressive mix of diverse and iconic images for a relatively small museum. Many were captured by photographers who, if nothing else, helped heighten their medium's creative, artistic-like elements.
The Big Picture runs until March 5.
