NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949, the result of a four-year collaborative project between the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, with the participation of over two dozen leading international photography scholars and conservators, making it the most extensive effort to integrate conservation, curatorial, and scholarly research efforts on photography to date. The project is composed of multiple parts: a website that features a suite of digital-visualization research tools that allow visitors to explore the collection, make queries, and discover connections themselves, supported by in-depth information on each photograph and an anthology of essays by scholars on selected themes and pictures; a hardbound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther collection, with extensive scholarly contributions; an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs; and a related exhibition of works from the Thomas Walther Collection, which is the first full presentation of this remarkable collection.
In 2001, MoMA acquired 341 photographs from Thomas Walther’s private collection, featuring iconic works by such seminal figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Florence Henri, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston, along with lesser-known treasures by more than 100 others.
In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the Museum a grant to encourage deep scholarly study of the Walther Collection and to support publication of the results. Led by the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, the project elicited productive collaborations among scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists, who investigated all of the factors involved in the making, appearance, condition, and history of each of the 341 photographs in the collection. The broadening of narrow specializations and the cross-fertilization between fields heightened appreciation of the singularity of each object and of its position within the history of its moment. Creating new standards for the consideration of photographs as original objects and of photography as an art form of unusually rich historical dimensions, the project affords both experts and those less familiar with its history new avenues for the appreciation of the medium.
The project is led by Maria Morris Hambourg, Senior Curator of the Thomas Walther Collection Project and Founding Curator, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jim Coddington, Agnes Gund Chief Conservator, Conservation Department, MoMA. The project is directed by Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA; and Lee Ann Daffner, Andrew W. Mellon Conservator of Photographs, MoMA.
Ms. Hambourg states: “It is difficult to overstate the importance of European avant-garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s, a period of exhilarating innovation that is the basis of our photo-based world, of small-camera and journalistic omnipresence, and the dominance of photographic codes and representations of information. The Thomas Walther Collection brings the achievements of that formative period in photography into clear focus at MoMA.”
Jim Coddington adds: “This project puts the object, the photograph, at the center of a seamless collaboration of curatorial, conservation, and scientific research; it has also opened up new ways of presenting that research. As such it is also a model for future deep research on objects and collections at MoMA and, we hope, in other collections.”
Website
Launched on December 9, 2014, the website MoMA.org/objectphoto is an innovative initiative in the digital presentation of a fine arts collection and of photographs in particular, presenting information and data in forms that take full advantage of digital humanities tools and resources. The centerpiece of the site is a suite of digital visualizations that allow visitors to explore the pictures and artists for themselves, generating their own queries, discovering connections and intersecting moments of historical significance, and fueling the next generation of scholarship.
Additionally, the site provides scholars with access to an unprecedented amount of research and information about individual photographs by bringing together deep archival research on each picture within the collection, including high-resolution images of the front, back, and surface details; extended provenance; related historical publications and exhibitions; and results of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy of many photographs in the collection. The site presents the research protocols for each of these technical examinations so that they can be replicated on other photographs and within other collections, making future research fully commensurable to that of this project.
The site also includes an anthology of over two dozen essays and case studies on works in the collection by leading photography scholars, many of whom specialize in the interwar avant-garde in Europe and America. Offering a host of diverse and sophisticated perspectives on the pictures, these studies place them in broader contexts—for example, within material parameters, historical events, period styles, the artists’ oeuvres, and the Museum’s collection.
Mitra Abbaspour states: “With this digital humanities initiative, MoMA presents a fresh take on its collection publications. Accessible to the wide, online audience, the site not only proffers original scholarship, deep, scientifically-derived materials data, curatorial texts, and historical sources, but also, its four visualizations encourage the online audience to continue building the discourse, generating the next generation of scholarship on this critical era of modern art history.”
Publication
At 400 pages, with over 100 full-page plates and a complete catalogue of the Thomas Walther Collection at MoMA, the publication Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949 proposes a history of a different kind, one based on material studies. The book revises the usual discussions of photography; moving away from the typical emphasis on the subject and the image, it focuses instead on the photographic object—the singular print, created by a certain individual at a particular time, with specific materials and techniques, and present today in its unique physicality. This kind of study is especially significant for the early modern period, when the medium exploded with creativity and was applied to multiple ends. Beginning with platinum prints and moving through various types of gelatin silver prints—ranging from negative prints to photograms, from photomontage to film strips—the period spanned the evolution of photography from the stand camera and static pose to small camera speed and flexibility, movie camera mobility, and the recombinant felicities of the darkroom.
Moreover, a growing awareness of the scarcity of prints made between the world wars encourages an approach that privileges the singularity of each work and the density of references each contains. The photographs are accordingly presented in the fullness of the multivalent research, including data on their material composition and physical attributes, together with complete provenance and citations of related exhibitions and publications, establishing a new standard of detailed and technical accounting that is comparable to the care given other major works on paper, such as drawings or fine prints. The plates in the book, reproduced to scale and in close approximation of the physical complexions of the prints, are sequenced into five richly allusive passages through the collection, through history, and through the places, preoccupations, and premonitions of the tumultuous period in which they were created.
The essays consider such topics as the birth and evolution of the photographic avant-garde in Berlin and at the Bauhaus, and the history of its reception and appreciation in Germany, France, and the United States from the 1920s to the present; the circulation of the pictures and the discourse they engaged through publications; the physical qualities of the Walther Collection pictures as evidence of the development of photographic materials during this period; and the importance of reference collections and shared research protocols for the furtherance of such studies. Together with new research and thematic studies involving The International Film and Photography Exhibition or “FiFo” of 1929; contemporary film; press photography; Weimar portraiture; and object-based case studies of Karl Blossfeldt, El Lissitzky, and Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, the diverse essays offer new perspectives on this formative era in photography.
Photographers include: Berenice Abbott, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Herbert Bayer, Aenne Biermann, Karl Blossfeldt, Max Burchartz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Paul Citroen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Walker Evans, Jaromir Funke, John Gutmann, Raoul Hausmann, Florence Henri, Lotte Jacobi, André Kertész, Edmund Kesting, Germaine Krull, Helmar Lerski, El Lissitzky, Eli Lotar, Werner Mantz, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Roger Parry, Walter Peterhans, Robert Petschow, Leni Riefenstahl, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Franz Roh, Werner Rohde, Jaroslav Rossler, Willi Ruge, August Sander, Osamu Shiihara, Edward Steichen, Kate Steinitz, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Dziga Vertov, Raoul Ubac, Umbo, and Weegee.
Exhibition
In conjunction with the project, MoMA will present the exhibition Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, on view from December 13, 2014, to April 19, 2015. With nearly 300 works, the exhibition is the first full-scale presentation of this remarkable group of images at MoMA. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. Organized thematically into six sections throughout the Museum’s Photography Galleries, the exhibition is organized by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.
