Photography Exhibition: Phoenix Art Museum - Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture

The Phoenix Art Museum periodically runs wonderful photographic exhibitions. Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture looks to be one of the year’s best photographic exhibitions in the US.

The exhibition will run from September 19, 2009 through January 10, 2009.

Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture explores the photographic portrait - the stories portraits can tell, the ways photographers convey the essence of their subjects and the impact of the relationship between photographer and subject. Including nearly 60 portraits from the Center for Creative Photography, as well as key loans from a few local collections, the exhibition raises engaging questions:

How does a portrait become iconic?
What is unique about a photographic self-portrait?
What are the advantages of working in the studio, or in the field?
How do photographers use setting, pose, camera angle, or scale to add meaning to a picture?

Prints by some of the greatest portraitists and photographic image-makers of the 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century are included: Southworth and Hawes, Gertrude Kasebier, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.