CHAPEL HILL, NC.- The Ackland Art Museum has the distinction of holding North Carolina’s leading collection of photographs, covering the history of the medium as an art form from its beginnings in the late 1830s to the present. Of the more than 2,000 photographs in the Ackland’s rich collection, more than 500 have been added in the last decade.

Over 150 selections from these recently acquired photographic works have been brought together for PhotoVision: Selections from a Decade of Collecting.

“The photographs in this exhibition are first and foremost presented as individual works of art, as each has its own aesthetic power,” says Ackland chief curator and interim director Peter Nisbet. “Whether beautiful, intriguing, or sublime, every photograph in PhotoVision is worthy of sustained attention.”

From salted paper prints and daguerreotypes to gelatin silver prints and digital inkjet prints, PhotoVision includes works by such prominent photographers as Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Mathew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, Philippe Halsman, Pieter Hugo, Nikki S. Lee, George Platt Lynes, Nicholas Nixon, Sandy Skoglund, Hiroshi Sugimoto, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Andy Warhol, among many others.

Organized by evocative groupings, the chosen photographs present the myriad intents and processes behind, and effects of, this powerful medium.

⦁ “Again and Again and Again” explores photographic multiplicity

⦁ “Process and Product” offers examples of a wide range of historical and modern photographic techniques

⦁ “Staging the Image” deals with the artificiality of photography and its constructed or manipulated images

⦁ “Sacred Spaces” presents photographs of sites of spiritual significance

⦁ A “Daisy Chain” links a heterogeneous group of photographs into a continuous, associational sequence

In addition, photographs from the Ackland’s collection are specially installed in each of the Museum’s eight permanent collection galleries, juxtaposed in thought-provoking ways with African, Asian, and Western paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts.

PhotoVision is organized by Peter Nisbet, interim director and chief curator, with Lauren Turner, curatorial assistant.

“We’re now 175 years from the announcement of the discovery of photography, and the pervasiveness of photographs in our age of camera phones, image-sharing apps, and media saturation is self-evident,” says Nisbet. “This very ubiquity can stimulate curiosity about the evolution of the medium, anxiety about which images are worth preserving, and enthusiasm about the medium’s seemingly inexhaustible potential. PhotoVision is presented with these questions, reactions, and emotions in mind.”

In connection with PhotoVision, the Ackland also presents Adding to the Mix 8: William H. Mumler’s “Mrs. W. H. Mumler, Clairvoyant Physician” (1870s), an exhibition focusing on the Ackland’s recent acquisition of a nineteenth-century spirit photograph by the foremost American practitioner of commercial spirit photography. The makers of spirit photographs claimed to capture images documenting supernatural presences. This example, the first of its kind in the Ackland collection, is presented alongside paintings and prints in which artists of various media and cultures have attempted to visualize the indescribable forces purported to make up other planes of being.