Currier Museum Visit

On Thursday we visited the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester to see the exhibit: A New Vision: Modernist Photography. Although, our visit was interrupted by a fire alarm, I was able to have enough time in the museum to study the photographs in the new exhibit. There were plenty of photographers that I recognized however there were a few that I enjoyed more than others.

The two photographs that I'm choosing to compare and contrast are:

Alfred G. Buckham's "Edinburgh"

and Berenice Abbott's "Theoline"

 I think that both these photographs have great compositions which move the viewer's eye throughout the entirety of the photographs. I think that even though these are digital copies of the originals, from what I remember the print quality of both images was pretty good, especially for the age. I was amazed with how in focus the images are. It seems like both of them are in focus from foreground to background. Both images have a geometric quality to them. "Edinburgh" has the buildings and such in the foreground which are very angular and "Theoline" has lots of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines from the ship and also the cityscape in the background. Both images have a good tonal range between the shadows and the highlights. I especially enjoy the shadows cast by the ship parts in "Theoline." Clearly, the subjects are different between the two images. I think that "Edinburgh" is more of a landscape and perhaps even an advertisement type photograph for air travel but I think that "Theoline" was a photograph created with an artistic intent. I think that Abbott noticed the shadows, lines, and the somewhat chaotic scene in front of her and decided to capture it.

I can't think of the names but there were pieces of artwork in the exhibit that were not photos. They were pen and ink drawings, etchings, and some paintings. I felt like those pieces didn't fit well in this photography exhibit. I also think that some of the Edward Weston photos were the best ones they could have included. There were a few that would've been more successful if Weston had included more of the tree or excluded something things in a few of the other pictures. Like I said, I don't have the exact names or descriptions of the images because I clearly didn't read the blog requirements prior to visiting the museum.

If I could have an image hanging on my wall in my house it would probably be a Gelatin-silver print made by Ralston Crawford. It's untitled but the description includes 'wharf objects.' It's a photo of a wharf with a building on the left side, a dock going into the background with what looks like a mooring ball and some other things similar to that sitting on the pier. I'm drawn to this image because of it's tonal quality and because I'm partial to some of the more pictorial images. Even though this image isn't technically a landscape, I still feel like that this would fall into the category of Pictorialism.

Overall, I enjoyed my visit to the museum. I'm glad that this exhibit was worth the time it took to drive down to Manchester because I've had experiences traveling to the Currier where the exhibit wasn't really worth my time and left disappointed. I was happy to see an exhibit at this museum that was different and more interesting than the more permanent exhibits that are on display.