NYACK, NY.- The Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center opened the exhibition, Portal: The Window in American Photography, featuring twenty three images by seventeen nationally and globally esteemed photographers drawn from the collection of the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. This exhibition of gelatin silver prints and color photographs date from the late 1920s to early 2000s. Collectively, they reveal how photographers employ a window as a pictorial device to frame and anchor each image and, technically and theoretically, to employ it as a recognizable transparent space, or threshold, between figures on each side.
The featured photographers are: William Anderson (American, 1932-2019), Toren Beasley (American, b. 1957), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002), Richard Buswell (American, b. 1945), Larry Clark (American, b. 1943), Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023), Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975), Florence Henri (Swiss, 1893-1982), Jay Jaffee (American, 1921-1999), Simpson Kalisher (American, b. 1926), Barbara Karant (American, b. 1952), Roger Mertin (American, 1942-2001), Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991), Pete Turner (American, 1934-2017), Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953), Minor White (American, 1908-1976), Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Despite the differences between the images, the photographers in this exhibition — and painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) —share an exploration of the storytelling capabilities of a simple aperture. Whether open to the elements or enclosed by glass, glimpsed in person or through a viewfinder, windows are portals to and from other real and imagined worlds.
“It is important to present Portal: The Window in American Photography at our landmark site as it is a visually stimulating exhibition from the Everson Museum of Art, a major central New York museum focusing on American art,” says Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, executive director of the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center. “With PORTAL we are launching our 2025 season and advancing our new strategic plan, and with it, a new mission to explore the intersection of place, memory, and creativity in Edward Hopper’s early life and artistic career. Through exhibitions like this, we are cultivating a community of learning and appreciation of the arts inspired by Hopper’s enduring local, national, and global legacy.”
The images on view reveal how the photographers employ the window as a portal that extends the viewer an invitation into the space and provides visual access to something beyond the physical and emotional reach of the frame. Minor White and Elliott Erwitt see the window as a framing device, using it to border the pictorial composition. Others, like Pete Turner and Carrie Mae Weems, transform windows into alluring architectural features. Florence Henri’s and Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s windows present a surrealist escape, while photographers Walker Evans, William Anderson, Aaron Siskind and Barbara Karant use windows to provide a view into the lives of their subjects.
“The medium of photography would not exist were it not for a window—the aperture in a camera through which light travels to create a fixed image,” says Steffi Chappell, Curator and Exhibition Manager at the Everson Museum of Art, who organized PORTAL in 2020. “A window even played a role in the birth of photography,” she explains. “The oldest surviving image, a heliograph captured in 1826/1827 by Joseph Nicephore Niépce, shows a French landscape framed by nearby houses, as viewed through an upstairs bedroom window. In the nearly two centuries since, photographers have repeatedly turned to windows as compositional elements, literal subjects, and symbolic devices.”
At the Edward Hopper House Museum, Portal is supplemented by an installation of original works on paper by Edward Hopper, on loan from private collectors; several are studies for major paintings such as Sunday (1926, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC), Hotel by the Railroad (1952, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC), and Woman in the Sun (1961, Whitney Museum of American Art) In these and other major canvases, Hopper employs this common and universal design element as a pictorial device to create spatial tension, with, to quote scholar Gail Levin, “the window as a symbol of the expansive world beyond the cramped interior.” This is in accord with the essential beliefs and theories of Hopper’s influential teacher, painter Robert Henri, who in The Art Spirit (1923) states: “The look of a wall or a window is a look into time and space. Windows are symbols. They are openings in. The wall carries its history. What we seek is not the moment alone.”
Hopper was preoccupied with the window throughout his career, with his characters often seen through the window’s vertical and horizontal framework and from the darkness of their surroundings. “As a youth in Nyack, Hopper experienced strong rays of morning light stream in through his east facing bedroom-studio windows,” says Ms. Bennewitz. “Perhaps such memories led him to employ the window as a source of light transforming the mood of the setting, just as the images of Minor White, Elliott Erwitt, William Anderson, and Garry Winogrand realize.” Diving deeper, in a more voyeuristic manner, Hopper uses the window to surround and trap his subjects in interior and exterior views simultaneously, as critic Brian O’Doherty once described. With painterly tactics, Hopper forces the viewer to consider the figures within their constructed environment — apartments, automats, diners, bedrooms, hotels, and offices.
The window serves the photographers of Portal, as it does Hopper, as a middle ground, marking a physical and emotional line between interior and exterior, belonging and isolation, and even freedom and oppression.
