January 29–May 9, 2010

Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris

Paris was a city of fantasy and chance encounters for Surrealist artists of the 1920s and '30s. During this period of unprecedented social and cultural transformation, photography played a dramatic new role in both avant-garde practice and mass culture. In their works, photographers such as Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassaï, Ilse Bing, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Dora Maar, and Man Ray used fragmentation, montage, unusual viewpoints, and various technical manipulations to expose the disjunctive and uncanny aspects of modern urban life. In Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris, guest curator Terry Lichtenstein has assembled over 150 photographs, films, books, periodicals, and Surrealist ephemera to show how real and imaginary versions of Paris were constructed through photographic images.

Miroslav Tichý

This is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of the reclusive and mysterious Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Now over eighty years old, Tichý is a stubbornly eccentric artist, known as much for his makeshift cardboard cameras as for his haunting and distorted images of women and landscapes, many of them taken surreptitiously. Tichý began photographing in the 1950s, in part as a political response to the social repressions of Czech communism. However, it is only in the past five years that his intensely private work has gained public attention. The exhibition, organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, includes a number of Tichý's homemade cameras as well as approximately 100 of his photographs.

Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place

Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place is an intimate exhibition that explores photography, memory and some of the meanings associated with "place." Guest curator and native Montrealer, David Deitcher, presents approximately 60 black-and-white photographs by the little-known, Montreal-based photographer, Alan B. Stone (1928–1992). Proceeding from the assumption that one knows one's past in part through pictures, Deitcher presents Stone's work as a case study by which to examine some of the ways in which people experience, use and are affected by photographs. A working photographer who practiced many photographic idioms, Stone's limited claim to fame stems from his vocation as a shrewd purveyor of beefcake—male pin-ups and physique photographs—which he produced, published and sold, beginning in 1953 under the name of the Mark One Studio. This exhibition combines a selection of these images with Stone's oblique, enigmatic pictures of Montreal and period newspaper articles to realize this exhibition's location of the place one associates with "home" at the confluence of time, space, history, politics, the law, memory and imagination.

Atget, Archivist of Paris

This presentation of 31 vintage prints by the celebrated French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) is drawn from the ICP permanent collection. Surrealists such as Man Ray were fascinated by Atget's images of dreamlike urban spaces. As this exhibition reveals, such photographs were part of a much larger body of work that reflected Atget's systematic documentation of the historic streets, buildings, and artifacts of Old Paris. This exhibition was organized by ICP Curator Christopher Phillips.