WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has been given 44 gelatin silver prints by the esteemed documentary photographer Wayne Miller (1918–2013). Given on behalf of his family and the artist’s estate, the group of photographs comprise a rich variety of themes central to his career. These are the first works by the artist to enter the collection and they deepen our holdings of documentary photography from the 1940s with compelling pictures that convey the horrific experience of war as well as the fullness of Black life in post-war Chicago.
Born in Chicago, Miller pursued studies in banking and business at the University of Illinois but turned his attention to photography in the early 1940s. He enlisted in the navy after the start of World War II as was assigned to the Naval Aviation Unit led by the famed photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973). Miller documented the war mainly in the Pacific and was among the first Americans to take pictures of the devastation in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. This experience convinced Miller of the importance of using photography to bring people together in meaningful ways. He returned to Chicago and spent two years photographing on the city’s South Side engaging with the vibrant African American community. Miller was awarded two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships in support of his project which includes pictures of daily life, street scenes, and compelling pictures of workers, such as a railroad maintenance man. Captured in mid-stride as he carries air hoses used to clean passenger cars, the young man assertively returns the photographer’s gaze. Other works included in the gift are photographs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral procession in Washington, DC, as well as intimate portraits of the photographer’s family.
Acquisition: Vik Muniz Photographs Given by Tony Podesta
Over the past two decades, gifts from the collection of Tony Podesta have contributed significantly to the contemporary holdings of the National Gallery of Art. Podesta has recently donated The Best of LIFE (1989, printed 1995) by Vik Muniz (b. 1961), a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints. These will join six later photographs by Muniz made between 1998 and 2011, also in the collection.
In 1983 when Muniz arrived in the United States from Brazil, he purchased a book titled The Best of LIFE, which included reproductions of iconic photographs by Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971), Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995), and others. Inspired by the idea that strangers shared a common visual memory, he drew great comfort from the book and saw it as a way of connecting with people in his adopted home. After he lost the book, he made drawings of several of the pictures, investigating, as he said, "the image within"—how we remember images. Next, he photographed the drawings, and to further approximate how he had first seen them in reproduction, he printed them through a halftone screen. He published these "memory renderings" in a portfolio in 1995.
