Photography, Sequence, & Time
September 14 – December 2, 2012
Lecture with Curator Russell Lord: Friday, Nov 30, 5:30pm
New Orleans Museum of Art
One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park,
New Orleans, Louisiana 70124
504-658-4100
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-5pm
Admission: $10; Seniors and Students, $8; Children 7-17 $6; Children 6 and under, free. Wednesdays are FREE for all museum visitors.
Individual photographs are powerful but open-ended messages. The photograph gives us a single moment, ripped from the relentless march of time and stripped of its narrative context. Without the before and after, this moment is re-staged as a timeless icon: no past, no future, only an eternal present. Throughout the history of photography, photographers have sought to overcome the limitations of the single photographic image by embedding it within series of sequential photographs. These sequences return the single image to a visible timeline and attempt to fix its meaning within the context of others. This exhibition examines the ways in which meaning, narrative, and time intersect in photographic sequences from the nineteenth century to the present.
Professional photographers, clever amateurs, and artists alike have produced photographic sequences to address issues from the mundane to the profound. Some explore the principles of physics, capturing movements too quick for the human eye, while others were conceived of as works of art. Some are humorous examples of “trick” photography; others are serious meditations on life and death. In these works, time can be measured in fractions of a second or decades, and it can be created fictionally or recorded factually. In all of these examples, what is not shown is just as important as what is: the empty space between each picture becomes a threshold for thought as our minds naturally seek to fill in the void, blending these discrete moments into a seamless continuum of space and time.
The constant assembling and re-shuffling of images has become an organizing principle in our lives, with image sequences that reach us with greater speed and frequency dictating the tenor and flow of the stories we tell. The works in this exhibition mirror this fragmented and multi-faceted nature of our increasingly visual culture. At the same time, they demonstrate that sequencing, fragmentation, and the manipulation of time have been central to photography from its origins to the present.
Photography, Sequence, and Time is curated by Russell Lord, and includes over 50 works, most from NOMA’s permanent collection, by photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Clarence John Laughlin, Milton Rogovin, Malick Sidibé, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Paul Graham.
The exhibition is on view in NOMA’s second floor Templeman Galleries through December 2, 2012.
Russell Lord will present a lecture on Friday, November 30 at 5:30pm during a special PhotoNOLA version of Where Y’Art?!
