“It might be more useful, if not necessarily true, to think of photography as a narrow deep area between the novel and the film.”
-- Lewis Baltz
When Cindy Sherman first posed before the camera for her now famous Untitled Film Stills series of photographs in the early 1980s, she was advancing a tradition that began with photography’s invention. Even as early as 1840, the French photographer Hippolyte Bayard was acting, playing the role of a drowned man, for one of his salted paper photographic prints. By mid-1850s, many photographers were staging more elaborate scenes, with O.G. Rejlanders’s now famous Two Ways of Life being one of the most ambitious. Julia Margaret Cameron’s evocative illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King have never been considered her most important work, however, its “tableau vivant” format can be seen in many photographs from the Victorian period.
The practice “staging” photographs continued into the 20th century, a century otherwise dominated by the rise of “straight” photography and the ascendance of the documentary photographer. So-called “Pictorialist” photographers such as William Mortensen and Harold Kells used themes from literature and history as a way to showcase their photographic nudes.
Later in the 1940s and 1950s, the staged photograph became an important tool in the world of advertising. Duane Michaels took the genre in a new direction in the 1960s when he posed models and himself in dramatic narratives that explored un-photographable subjects such as love and death.
Several contemporary photographers such as Yasumasa Morimura and Wang Quingsong have used the staged photograph to probe issues such as identity (sexual and cultural) while others, including Larry Fink blend advertising and art history into biting social satire.
Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre is one of the first exhibitions to explore the transformation and wide variety of staged photographs from the 19th century to the present, contemporary practice. This exhibition will include works by O.G. Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Henry Peach Robinson, Man Ray, Duane Michaels, Les Krims, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Yasumasa Morimura and Wang Quingsong along with many others.
This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue and a film series.
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada. |
