Critical Eye: Photographic Collections before the Digital Age

November 3 - December 4, 2022

THE GRIFFIN MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to showcase works from across the genre of photography with its exhibition, Critical Eye | Photographic Collections before the Digital Age. This wide-ranging exhibition features the works of ten New England based collectors. Ten visions spanning the medium through the twenty and twenty-first century.

Works on display from such photographic luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, Mike Disfarmer, Arthur Wesley Dow, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans and Weegee. We see new works from contemporary artists Julie Blackmon, Abelardo Morell Matthew Pillsbury, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Carrie Mae Weems .

The work embraces the craft of photography, with wet darkroom techniques spanning alternative processes like albumen, platinum palladium, tintypes and gelatin silver. The visions encompass all genres, including portraiture, landscape, architecture and narrative works. It is a masterclass in creativity.

This exhibition is curated by Andrew (Drew) Epstein. We are grateful to our collectors, without them this show wouldn't be possible. Eric & Nanny Almquist, Ronit & William Berkman, James Fitts, Allan Katz, Gary Leopold, Ryck & Jennifer Lent, Michael & Elizabeth Marcus and Olivia Parker.

A catalog of the exhibition will be available at the museum.

We are thrilled to have three programs associated with the exhibition. On November 16th we host W.M. Hunt, collector, curator and consultant to have a virtual walkthrough of the exhibition and discussion with the collectors about their visions.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of the Griffin Society, the Griffin PhotoCircle, and the Winchester Cultural District. We thank them for their contributions to seeing this exhibition come to life in Winchester.

Wendy Looking, 1978 © Roy DeCarava

About the Griffin Museum
The Griffin Museum of Photography was founded in 1992 to provide a forum for the exhibition of both historic and contemporary photography. The Museum houses three galleries dedicated solely to the exploration of photographic arts: The Main Gallery, which features rotating exhibits from some of the world's leading photographers, the Atelier Gallery and Griffin Gallery dedicated to showcasing the works of prominent, up-and-coming artists. The Griffin is also home to the extensive archives of museum founder and world-renowned photojournalist Arthur Griffin. The Griffin Museum of Photography also maintains 2 additional satellite galleries: Lafayette City Center Passageway in Boston Downtown Crossing, in Winchester @WinCam at Winchester Community Access and Media. For more on the Griffin Museum of Photography, visit www.griffinmuseum.org.

Broadway Limited, 1958 © Louis Stettner

Michael Joseph: Lost & Found

By Michael Joseph

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 144 pages

Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.

The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.

An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo

All About Michael Joseph

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

By Pauline Vermare

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 440 pages

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.

Lisa McCord: Rotan Switch

By Lisa McCord

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 204 pages

Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.

All About Lisa McCord

João Pina: Tarrafal

By João Pina

Publisher : GOST Books

2024 | 284 pages

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise. In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visit their son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside the concentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the other prisoners held in the camp or had died there. Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing the negatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with related letters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.

Critical Eye: Photographic Collections before the Digital Age

November 3 - December 4, 2022

Griffin Museum of Photography Website

Selected Books