Getty features influential photographers

updated 5:23 p.m. ET March 18, 2004

LOS ANGELES - The J. Paul Getty Museum, drawing from one of the largest photo collections in the country, has opened a new exhibit featuring photographers who helped shape the art form.

Among them are Lewis Hine, who took pictures of turn-of-the-century child laborers to expose exploitation; Alfred Stieglitz, whose portraits of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and other works helped photography become recognized as an art; and August Sander, who turned passport pictures of persecuted Jews into sympathetic portraits.

Also included are Man Ray, the artist and photographer who made strong contributions to both Dadaism and surrealism, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the godfather of photojournalism.

“They’re people who challenged the norms, pushed the boundaries and helped photography evolve,” curator Weston Naef said about the “Photographers of Genius at the Getty” exhibit.

“They must also inspire their contemporaries or later generations of photographers, who take advances given to them and move it to another level.”

The exhibit shows 158 images by 38 photographers and runs through July 25 at the Getty Center, the $1 billion museum and research complex nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific coast. It is also intended to celebrate the museum’s acquisition of some 100,000 images in just 20 years.

In creating the show, Naef picked at least three closely related photographs by each photographer deemed to be an innovator of the medium.

He pointed to Hine, an American, as a pioneer of social documentary whose images of children in mines, factories and sweatshops inspired other photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose portraits of Depression-era sharecroppers and migrant workers raised social and political awareness of their living conditions.

“These were artists standing on the shoulder of other artists,” Naef said.

Early images
The exhibit traces photography’s earliest years in England and France in the late 1830s to images made in the United States in the 1960s.

One of the oldest images is a direct-negative cyanotype by French photographer Hippolyte Bayard, made around 1842 by placing feathers, leaves, flowers and scrap of fabric on light-sensitive paper. The delicate print will be shown briefly during the show then replaced by other cyanotypes to avoid long exposure to light.

The exhibit also includes daguerreotypes by early innovator Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey that have never been displayed. They include some of the earliest surviving images of ancient monuments in Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor taken by the Frenchman between 1842 and 1843.

The show is among four photography exhibits at Los Angeles art museums.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting a traveling retrospective of Diane Arbus, a fashion photographer known for her portraits of eccentrics during the 1950s and 1960s. The Museum of Contemporary Art is showing 200 “street photography” images from the 1940s to the 1970s by Arbus and her peers; and the UCLA Hammer Museum is displaying 150 works by 57 artists who dabble in photography.

The Getty’s exhibit marks the 20th anniversary of its department of photographs, which started in 1984 when the museum acquired nine private collections totaling 18,000 photographs. It became the only department at the Getty to extend its collection to 20th-century works, museum director Deborah Gribbon said.

The new exhibit also features photographers who elevated the art form by simply rebelling against conventions. Shots of social outcasts by Sander, a German photographer, were banned by the Nazis in the 1930s.

Naef said that Sander influenced later photographers such as Evans, whose portraits of New York subway riders “captured people in reverie and self-reflection that raised the art form to another level and created inspiration.”

Lange took her training in formal studio portraiture to focus on migrant workers and American Indians in Taos, N.M.

“Ordinary people, not rich or famous, but the forgotten ones,” Naef said. “These are all artists who painstakingly observed and elevated us to new levels of understanding.”

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