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. Surrealist photographers attempted to capture the mystery and wonder and anticipation they experienced as they wandered through the labyrinthine streets of Paris. In their works, photographers such as Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassai, 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 bits of Surrealist ephemera to show how real and imaginary versions of the city 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 something of an outsider 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, but his intensely private work has received public attention only in the last five years. 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
What we call "place" is a confluence of time, space, geography bounded by history, politics, the law, and memory. To try to describe this locus of the imaginary through pictures is virtually impossible. Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place is an intimate exhibition featuring the work of a little-known Montreal photographer named Alan B. Stone (1928–1992). Stone’s limited claim to fame stems mostly from his vocation as a shrewd purveyor of male body photographs—or "beefcake"—which he produced and discretely distributed under the name Mark One Studio, beginning in 1953, to a primarily gay audience. But equally interesting are the oblique and suggestive outdoor pictures Stone made in Montreal during the 1950s and '60s, a period of overt suppression of homosexuality. This exhibition, organized by guest curator David Deitcher, combines a selection of Stone's published and unpublished photographs alongside period newspapers and posters to examine how people experience, use, and are affected by photographs.
