Infinite Pause: Photography and Time at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Wellfleet, Massachusetts, 2015, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Nina and Michael Zilkha, The Manfred Heiting Collection. © Nicholas Nixon
Aaron Siskind, No. 99, from the series Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, 1961, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, bequest of Morgan Garwood. © Aaron Siskind Foundation
Harold E. Edgerton, Cutting the Card Quickly, 1964, dye imbibition print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the Harold and Esther Edgerton Foundation. © The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sam Eric, Pennsylvania, 1978, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Louisa Stude Sarofim Charitable Trust courtesy of Mary Lawrence Porter and by the S. I. Morris Photography Endowment. © Hiroshi Sugimoto
![Harold E. Edgerton, [Bobby Jones Golf Swing, Side View], c. 1938, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the Harold and Esther Edgerton Foundation. © The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation](https://test.mfah.org/static/images/edgerton---bobby-jones-golf-swing.2501608172005033046.jpg?width=1680){kind=link}
Harold E. Edgerton, [Bobby Jones Golf Swing, Side View], c. 1938, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the Harold and Esther Edgerton Foundation. © The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation
Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1975, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Nina and Michael Zilkha, The Manfred Heiting Collection. © Nicholas Nixon
Detlef Erler, Pina Bausch, 1992, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Pampa Risso-Patrón, The Manfred Heiting Collection. © Detlef Erler
Shōmei Tōmatsu, Atomic Bomb Damage: Wristwatch Stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945, from the series 11:02—Nagasaki, 1961, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Janice and Robert C. McNair at “One Great Night in November, 2010,” in honor of the birth of their grandson, Robert Daniel McNair, and in the hope that during his lifetime there will be peace. © Tōmatsu Shōmei
Nearly 50 works offer snapshot of time’s relationship with photography
Title
Infinite Pause: Photography and Time
Dates
June 18–September 5, 2016
Overview
This exhibition explores photography’s ability to both stop time in an instant and to capture its extended duration, immortalizing people and moments that have already passed.
Featuring nearly 50 photographs from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition highlights works by artists as diverse as Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, Harold Edgerton, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Harry Callahan, Nicholas Nixon, Dawoud Bey, and Duane Michals.
The first section of the exhibition features photographs that celebrate the medium’s power as a visual record, extending the life of a subject. Included are a recently acquired postmortem daguerreotype portrait from the mid-1850s and Giorgio Sommer’s image, Dog, Pompeii, c. 1870, of a plaster cast of a dog caught in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly two thousand years ago.
The second section highlights works in which the camera has frozen time in an instantaneous flash or traced its sequential unfolding. Featured are three works by Harold Edgerton, including Bobby Jones Golf Swing, Side View, c. 1938, Fan and Smoke Vortices, 1934, and Cutting the Card Quickly, 1964. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgerton transformed the stroboscope into a device commonly used in photography to capture movements or events too fleeting to be seen by the naked eye, earning him the nickname “Papa Flash.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Edgerton’s instantaneity, photographs in the third section employ extended exposures to dive into the density and movement of light built up over time. Included is Sam Eric, Pennsylvania, 1978, by Hiroshi Sugimoto, in which the interior of a 1920s movie palace is softly illuminated by the light of the glowing screen during an exposure that lasted through an entire feature-length movie.
The final section features work by artists who take a conceptual approach to the subject, examining the passage of time through portraiture or experimenting with the layering of disparate moments into a narrative. The section includes the earliest and most recent images from Nicholas Nixon’s iconic portrait series of the Brown Sisters, begun in 1975 and continued annually ever since.
The exhibition, which is organized by Allison Pappas, assistant curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is on view from June 18, 2016, to September 5, 2016, which, as of May 31, is a change from the originally scheduled closing date of September 11, 2016.
Location
Cameron Foundation Gallery
The Audrey Jones Beck Building
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
5601 Main Street
Organization
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Media Contact
Sarah Baker, associate publicist
sbaker@mfah.org / 713.800.5345