A Decade of Collecting:
Photography from the Baruch College Collection

October 18 - November 13, 2002

Baruch College has an exceptionally strong photography collection, with black and white and color works by some of the twentieth century's great photographers. This selection from the Baruch collection represents some of the major trends in twentieth century photography, from the 1930s through the 1990s, and testifies to the expressive possibilities of the medium.

From the invention of the daguerreotype portrait in the nineteenth century to the latest trends in contemporary art, portraiture has remained one of the most popular uses of photography. Edward Steichen's artfully staged studio portraits and Milt Hinton's improvisational portraits of jazz musicians demonstrate the wide-ranging potential of the photographic portrait, straddling the worlds of art, entertainment, and sociology. Neal Slavin's staged group portraits of clubs and other organized groups are sociological documents, profiling a cross section of American culture at a particular moment.

Social documentary photography proliferated in the 1930s in response to the social and economic devastation of the Great Depression. In this exhibition, the poignant and sobering works of Gilles Peress demonstrate the photojournalistic aim of objectively documenting human suffering, letting the ravages of war and genocide speak for themselves. Other examples of social documentary photography in the Baruch collection range from the whimsical images of Elliott Erwitt to the stylish, penetrating commentary of Larry Fink's high society photographs.

Street photography is associated with a specifically urban social consciousness and has evolved to incorporate a range of humanistic interpretations of the city. Street photography is represented in this show by Jerome Liebling's classic images of inner city children and by Joel Meyerowitz's images of the social contrasts and witty juxtapositions of New York City street life.

Landscape and other subjects from nature have been mainstays of the photographic medium since the inception of photography. A Decade of Collecting presents classical views of landscape in the works of Eliot Porter and Erica Lennard, as well as unexpected views of nature by Marilyn Bridges, Sally Gall, and Ralph Gibson.

The Sidney Mishkin Gallery is located at Baruch College
135 East 22 Street
New York City

Gallery hours are:
Monday-Friday, 12 noon-5 p.m.
Thursdays, 12 noon-7 p.m.
All exhibitions at the gallery are free and open to the public.

© 2002 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College