2007 Benefit Print Sale, Disney Hall at Twilight by Julius Shulman and Juergen Nogai. More information [PDF, 81K] The Photography department, founded in 1984 through an endowment by the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, has a collection of approximately six thousand works. The collection maintains a primary emphasis on work produced internationally since 1940. In keeping with the encyclopedic nature of the museum, however, the department's holdings include examples of photographic output from the medium's invention in 1839 to the present. In addition to gelatin-silver prints and chromogenic-development prints, the most commonly used black-and-white and color processes, the collection includes examples of nineteenth-century cased images, paper and glass negative processes; twentieth-century experimental processes; contemporary color images; and images that are created, manipulated, and/or printed digitally. Among the highlights of LACMA's photography collection are substantial holdings of work that spans the career of Edward Weston, a large body of pictorialist work from the 1918–47 Los Angeles International Salons of Photography, the complete manuscript for The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, including its more than 70 montage and collage works, and the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection of Photographic Self-Portraits. The permanent collection also includes works by modern American masters Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Alfred Stieglitz, and Minor White; early European experimenters František Drtikol, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patszch, and Alexander Rodchenko; midcentury innovators Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Robert Heinecken; an international array of contemporary artists including Vito Acconci, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Eikoh Hosoe, Anselm Kiefer, Barbara Kruger, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Sigmar Polke, Sebastião Salgado, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Carrie Mae Weems; as well as an impressive ensemble of Los Angeles-based midcareer and emerging artists such as Uta Barth, Cindy Bernard, Robbert Flick, Anthony Hernandez, and Susan Rankaitis. The photography department organizes approximately four large exhibitions per year as well as four small foyer exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection. In addition, the department administers the prestigious Ralph M. Parsons Lectures on Photography series, which presents semiannual programs by outstanding international writers, critics, educators, and curators.

Highlights from Photography

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SLIDESHOW
The late curator Robert A. Sobieszek expanded LACMA's photography collection by more than 6,000 works. Here, in his memory, are 38 of them.

Born in Russia, Val Telberg lived in Moscow and in Tungchow, China, before coming to the United States in 1928 to complete his education. He studied painting at the Art Students League in New York, where he encountered the work of surrealist artists René Magritte and Salvador Dali as well as the films of Jean Cocteau and other experimental filmmakers. Telberg supported himself with a number of odd jobs, including a quick-developing service for nightclub camera girls, and he later ran a comic-photo concession at an amusement park. This commercial work constituted Telberg's introduction to manipulating photographic processes, but by 1945 he had begun a serious exploration of photography.

Like Clarence John Laughlin, Telberg uses surrealistic practices, such as allowing accidental juxtapositions of found symbols to express intuitive thoughts. More than Laughlin, Telberg exploits a sense of unreality by using negative images, solarization, and recombined images. His use in the 1940s of composite printing placed his work outside what was then recognized as photography's mainstream.

Telberg's interest in cinema, especially the uses of dissolves, has had a profound effect on his work. His photographs, in fact, resemble film footage that has been compressed and collaged rather than left to play out over time. As in Portrait of a Friend, narrative images are arranged with abstract elements in a dense and detailed frame, the layers of overlapping, abstract forms obscuring the realistic imagery. The viewer must determine whether the scene moves forward, backward, or both.

Alfred Stieglitz's impact on photography in the United States was enormous. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, he spent ten years in Europe gaining an education and recognition as a talented photographer. Upon his return to America he became involved in campaigns promoting photography as a valid artistic medium and was editor of a number of influential journals, including Camera Work and 291. He founded the Photo-Secession, a loose association that included photographers Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, and Frank Eugene, and organized national exhibitions of photography. In 1905 he founded the 291 Gallery in New York, where he introduced the American public to contemporary European art movements. His ideas profoundly influenced many artists and photographers, including Ansel Adams, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand.

Steiglitz's photography evolved from atmospheric images of urban life made in the 1880s and 1890s to cubist-influenced compositions in the early years of the century. In the 1920s he began a series called Equivalents, evocative photographs of clouds and sky meant to convey emotional and intellectual meanings through visual form and tonal range rather than through identifiable and specific subjects.

The Steerage is one of Steglitz's best-known images and one of the first he made based on his growing sense of photography as an independent medium. It is free of any soft-focus imitation of painted technique. Its powerful geometric opposition of shapes has a clear cubist tendency that marks a turning point in the development of American photography.

John Gutmann, an expressionist painter in the manner of Die Brücke, arrived in the United States in 1933 to photograph Depression-era America with a Rollei camera for Press-Foto, a German agency. He settled in California and continued to take photographs for the German illustrated weeklies. In the late 1930s he switched to a new press agency, and his work began to be published in American magazines.

Gutmann was fascinated by Eastern urban culture, and his photojournalistic style and subject matter were quite distinct from that of his Californian contemporaries, William Mortensen, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. Gutmann made a trip across America in 1936, staying several months in New York City before making his way back to the West Coast. Like the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, who twenty years later also made a cross-country odyssey, Gutmann sought ordinary people and events as his subjects and captured the mundane in a way that prompts the observer to insight.

Gutmann always provided captions for his photojournalism assignments and carried this practice over to his own work. Black Jack at Reno at Election Time, depicting players as intent as stockbrokers before the chalkboard roster of odds, becomes a more potent image when the ordinary yet insular activity of gambling is juxtaposed with the auspicious event of an election.

John Pfahl is a photographer who works completely within the straightforward, documentary tradition of photography, yet his work also defies that tradition. He uses our expectations of photographic truth to demonstrate how "facts" can be manufactured. In the Altered Landscapes portfolio, each image is the result of painstaking technical work on the site to construct ingenious and witty illusions of perspective. In a more recent body of work, Power Places, Pfahl photographed the sites of nuclear power plants in the grand style of nineteenth-century photographers who captured the beauty and monumentality of nature. He thus creates an ironic commentary on the place of such plants in the modern landscape.

For Triangle, Bermuda Pfahl stationed his camera in an intertidal zone where he constructed the base of a triangle: its other two legs run into the sea-wash. Pfahl photographed what appeared before his camera, but the objects he recorded are not actually where they appear to be. The monocular camera has compressed space to give the illusion that the rock in the background and the pegs in the foreground really lie in the same plane. The image reads as a string drawing yet also conveys scale and distance, creating a disconcerting shift between simultaneous yet contradictory perceptions of real space.

The self-conscious awareness that we live in a camera-based and camera-bound culture marks the so-called postmodernist vein of art and photography that emerged in the early 1980s. This kind of art accepts the world as a place of images, an endless hall of mirrors where images are not only all we can see but also all we can ever know of reality. Concepts of originality and individual artistic vision have little relevance in this world. These are disconcerting and radical ideas, and photography, considered a very nearly indiscriminate producer of images, figures largely in them.

Since 1980 Eileen Cowin has made photographic tableaux that she at one time called "family docudramas." Referring loosely to television soap opera vignettes, film stills, or even romance comic strips, these elegant photographs represent arranged family situations that imply discord. Cowin uses herself as a foil, at times including her identical twin sister as well as other family members. In a scene such as this, where both twins appear, the two women read as one, embodying the ambiguity of the participant and observer, of reality and fantasy, of anxious ego and critical superego.

In the customary formalized sittings and casual snapshots of family life, conflicts and tensions stemming from envy or dissension are suppressed. In contrast, even though her tableaux are artifices painstakingly mounted in the studio, Cowin's images evoke a sense of confrontation, an arrested and enigmatic interaction that has no single meaning. They assume the emotions, sympathies, and interpretations that the viewer brings to them.