Subject, Object, Still Life:
A Photographic View of the Figure
  from the Baruch College Collection

Through the photographic use of the figure, this exhibition examines the meanings we ascribe to the human body through the diverse contexts of subject, object, and still life in the work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Larry Clark, Lucien Clergue, Elliot Erwitt, Larry Fink, Ralph Gibson, Milt Hinton, Helmut Newton, and Gary Winogrand. Although the human figure is familiar as a subject and as an object with which we identify, it has captured the attention of artists for centuries. And yet as familiar as it is, the figure often startles us when it is made the focus of a photographic image. What was previously so familiar becomes the ground of new understanding as the figure lends its image to the changing contexts of sub ect, object, and even still life evoked by the camera. The contested meanings of the body produced by these diverse contexts lie at the heart of much contemporary photography.

Using color and black and white photographs, Subject, Object, Still Life examines the figure through the meanings that these three terms construct. Artists have long sought to grasp the essential qualities of representative social categories, but with the rise of "new documentary" photography in the 1960s, the camera gained a privileged place in capturing the individual subjectivities that support those categories. Similarly, the human body has a long artistic tradition as an aesthetic object, which the camera lens intensifies through its formal contrasts of light and dark. The photograph has also given new vitality to the genre of still life by its ability to render the body as a figurative element of display.

© 1998 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College