Strength in Numbers: Photography in Groups draws on the collections of all four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh to explore the combined power of multiple photographs. Featuring nearly 100 works dating from the late 1800s to the present, Strength in Numbers highlights series of photographs organized around three themes: People, Place, and Perspective.

The exhibition features work dating from as early as 1887 and as recent as 2011 by artists including John Divola, Judy Fiskin, Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart, Eadweard Muybridge, Eliot Porter, and Andy Warhol. Strength in Numbers: Photography in Groups is the first exhibition organized for Carnegie Museum of Art by its new curator of photography, Dan Leers.

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Jul 23, 2016–Feb 6, 2017
Carnegie Museum of Art
GALLERY ONE

Courtesy of: Carnegie Museum of Art

 

The photographer as witness is a familiar conceit, one that evokes the artist’s responsibility to observe the lives of others. It’s a role that has been reinforced by traditions of photojournalism, documentary photography, and anthropology, while taking on new forms and renewed urgency in recent years. Drawn largely from the MCA’s collection, the photographs in Witness at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) put pressure on familiar understandings of the photographer’s role as self-appointed observer. These works record, reflect on, or stage different kinds of encounters between photographer and subject. In doing so, the artists lead us to think about the various people who play a part in a given photograph—including the viewer—and how they contribute to, or sometimes confound, what it seems to convey.

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Jul 2, 2016–Feb 12, 2017
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611

 

THE ARTISTS FEATURED IN WITNESS INCLUDE:

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Christian Boltanski (French, b. 1944)
Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953)
Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Walker Evans (American, 1903–1976)
Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950)
David Hockney (British, b. 1937)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (American, b. 1982)
Alfredo Jaar (Chilean, b. 1956)
Jason Lazarus (American, b. 1975)
Sharon Lockhart (American, b. 1964)
Kerry James Marshall (American, b. 1955)
Michael Rovner (Israeli, b. 1957)
Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Collier Schorr (American, b. 1963)
Andres Serrano (American, b. 1950)
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)

Courtesy of: MCA Chicago

LaToya Ruby Frazier, a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, documents three generations of Blackness in a decaying steel mill town

By LaToya Cross

“This is not an art project.”
But rather the collection of over 100 photographs is the life of photographer and Art Institute of Chicago instructor, LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Inspired by Gordon Parks’ ideology of using the camera as a “weapon” to fight against racism, poverty and social wrongs, Frazier has spent the last 12 years focusing her lens on the collapse of the once booming steel mill industry in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Titled, Notion of Family, the visual documentation also addresses and counters the “historic erasure, silence and media portrayal that trivialized and undermined Black life,” Frazier explains.

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Courtesy of Ebony