About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change
May 14 – September 25, 2016
This thematic exhibition brings together work from across the medium’s history — from daguerreotypes to slide projections to video installations — that consider the way photography’s complex and ever-changing relationship with time has reflected and inflected our ideas about permanence and obsolescence, history and memory. In a period of tremendous technological change, this exhibition puts historical and contemporary works in dialogue to highlight the fundamental issues that have been central to the medium since its invention. The presentation showcases work by Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Phil Chang, Dawoud Bey, Owen Kydd, and Zoe Leonard, among others, as well as Recordings #3 (At sea), a newly commissioned installation by Jason Lazarus. –SFMOMA
PRESS:
REVIEW: SFMOMA”s expansion offers a deep dive into blue-chip artists’ works by Christopher Knight, 2016
REVIEW: San Francisco Roundup by Jeanne Gerrity, 2016
Recordings #3 (At Sea) (2014–16)
found photographs
32×12′
Recordings #3 (At Sea)
2014-2016
Gelatin silver prints and chromogenic prints
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Lazarus said of this work: “Named after one of the photographs found in the installation, Recordings #3 (At Sea) continues my practice of assembling archives that explore the private and public meanings of photographs, as well as the nature of the medium itself. Outstripping simple notions of nostalgia, these found objects evoke images through what I’ve termed ‘snapshot writing’–handwritten inscriptions originally intended for a small, often intimate audience, replaced now by hashtags that immediately become public, performative, and archival acts. This installation asks viewers to engage the photographic imaginary in an era when ubiquitous images often fail to show us something new. It is in the margins of the photographic medium that I find nascent meaning.”
A video produced by SF MoMA about the installation can be viewed here (3:16).
Documentation images by Johnna Arnold
Recordings #3 (At Sea) (2014–16)
Commissioned by SF MOMA
32×12′
detail
