The Phillips Collection Announces Plans to Highlight Recent Gifts from Its Growing Photography Collection

American Moments: Photographs from The Phillips Collection displays works by Berenice Abbott, Esther Bubley, Bruce Davidson, Paul Strand, and Brett Weston, among others.

Washington, DC—In celebration of recent major gifts, this summer The Phillips Collection presents for the first time a major photography exhibition drawn exclusively from the museum’s permanent collection. American Moments: Photographs from The Phillips Collection features more than 140 photographs that capture the 20th-century American experience. More than 30 renowned artists are represented in the exhibition, and many of the works selected for display are new to the collection, including photographs by Esther Bubley, Bruce Davidson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Louis Faurer, Joel Meyerowitz, and Arnold Newman. On view June 6 through Sept. 13, 2015, American Moments showcases the strength of the museum’s fast-growing photography collection through images by key figures of American modernism.

Dating from c. 1917–c. 1980, the photographs in American Moments are grouped into loose themes representative of a period of immense change and transformation in America. The city became one of America’s most potent symbols after World War I, and photographs by artists Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, and Margaret Bourke-White, among others, capture its sense of wonder. Their abstractions of buildings and machinery —tightly cropped compositions taken at unconventional angles—evoke signs of urbanism, invention and industry. Berenice Abbott documented the transformation of New York City into a modern urban center with impressive photographs of the skyscrapers that replaced older buildings. These photographs, which were featured in her book Changing New York (1939), a Federal Works Project Administration initiative, show Abbott favoring a straightforward, yet dynamic style of strong contrasts and dramatic views. The energy and nightlife of Times Square revealed in Louis Faurer’sbustling street scenes and crowded spaces lit by movie marquees show a somewhat darker impression of the city.

Urban and rural scenes taken from across America by photographers who had either worked for the Farm Security Administration or its successor organization, the Office of War Information (OWI), are highlighted in this exhibition. Sent to the field to frame images of middle-class life during and after World War II, OWI staff photographer Esther Bubley created a social portrait of America. Drawn to the world of the everyday, Bubley documented a response to the war-time housing shortage in photographs of boarding house life in Washington, DC and the neighboring suburbs of Northern Virginia.

While traveling along Route 1, Abbott took photos from Maine to Florida, expertly capturing the essence of small-town America; and BruceDavidson and Lee Friedlander’s seemingly random slice-of-life images transformed vernacular landscapes into engaging formal compositions. Bubley and Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of the first staff photographers forLife magazine, also documented the changing face of the workforce that now included women.

Other photographs in the exhibition show themes inspired by modern life. Bubley’s examples drawn from magazine commissions range from intimate scenes of familial connection inspired by the snapshot to moving depictions of patients with mental illness. Many of Davidson’s photographs reveal subjects in isolation, while others like his East 100th Street in Harlem series broadly explore social issues of identity, representation, and memory. Both artists distill the transitory nature of the American experience in scenes of travel. In 1943 and 1947, Bubley documented American bus travel, which had dramatically increased with the rationing of gasoline and tires during and after the war, and Davidson captured postwar society on the move in buses, cars, and on subways.

“The thematic organization in American Moments is shaped by these seminal American photographers who captured the permanent and the universal, the immediate and the transitory, distilling key narratives into evocative images of the American experience,” says exhibition curator Renee Maurer. “Evoking a sense of place and experience, this exhibition celebrates American life in the 20th century.”

PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

Although a passionate collector of painting, Duncan Phillips became increasingly interested in the creative possibilities of photography, expressing his belief by the mid-1920s that photography was important for a museum devoted to Modern art. For Phillips, Alfred Stieglitz was the modern hero who revolutionized photography with his artist’s sensibility and perception. In 1935, Phillips wrote “Stieglitz has made the technique of photography not merely self-controlled but sensitive and intensely emotional.” This appreciation led Phillips to begin collecting photographs during the 1940s including 27 works by Clarence John Laughlin and 19 of Stieglitz’sEquivalents, given to the museum in 1949 by Georgia O’Keeffe. In the 1940s Phillips inaugurated a series of photography exhibitions at the museum, including Clarence John Laughlin’s first solo museum show. Before his death in 1966, Phillips, who knew and admired the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, made certain to acquire a number of his photographs in addition to organizing a solo show of the artist’s work at the museum.

“Although Duncan Phillips never made photography a primary focus of his collecting, he recognized its importance to his museum endeavor and to our understanding of modernism,” says Associate Curator for Research Susan Behrends Frank. “The photographs in American Moments emphasize qualities that Phillips always championed—the artist’s personal vision and the universality of the human condition.”