TITLE PANEL

Elliot Schwartz

Jane Evelyn Atwood
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Nan Goldin
Edward Grazda
Frank Horvat
Josef Koudelka
Max Kozloff
Martin Parr
Gilles Peress
Rosalind Solomon
Michael Spano

Carl De Keyzer
Adam Fuss
Flor Garduno
Alex Harris
Manual
(Suzanne Bloom and
Edward Hill)
Duane Michals
Nicholas Nixon
Sylvia Plachy
Cristina Garcia Rodero
Thomas Roma
Cindy Sherman

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

In Michelle Agins's work Safe Haven, an infant nestles in the wide expanse of its mother's chest. Agins was born in Chicago in 1956 and raised by her grandparents after both her parents died. One day when she was twelve, she was taking pictures of her neighborhood. John Tweedle, a photographer for the Chicago Daily News, noticed her camera and offered to teach her about photography. Agins went on to become the first black woman in the International Photographers of the Motion Picture and Television Industries Union. Her photographs have been published by the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, The New York Times, Encore, Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet. In the 1980s, Agins served as the official photographer for Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago. Agins is featured in the 1986 book Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers by Jeanne Moussotomy-Ashe.

Along with Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edouard Boubat (b. 1923) is considered one of the premier French photographers of the post-war generation. Boubat began his career as a photojournalist in 1951, and worked for the French magazine Réalités from 1952 through 1967. He traveled the world, capturing images of people engaged in social and religious rituals. Boubat's works, including Paris Maternité in this exhibition, reveal a profound respect for the human spirit.

Using atmospheric effects and surprising juxtapositions, Keith Carter (b. 1948) transforms the everyday world of his hometown in east Texas into a surreal landscape. Fireflies exemplifies the dreamlike quality of Carter's work. Although the plants around them are crisply focused, the two boys and their jar of fireflies seem to shimmer and dissolve. He shoots with a single-lens reflex camera; its 2.5-inch square negatives allow him to create large prints without losing any of the rich, velvety texture of his images.

Reuben L. Cox (b. 1972) creates vibrant, snapshot-like color images of people in rural North Carolina, where he grew up. Cox was featured in Twenty-Five and Under, Alice Rose George's 1997 exhibition of work by promising young photographers.

Mitch Epstein (b. 1952) has been described as a "travel photographer of note." The artist took Mai and Trinh Tuong, Hanoi, Vietnam during an extended stay in Vietnam in 1993. His 1994 exhibition of this Vietnam series in New York was well received. Epstein works in the documentary tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, trying to capture the decisive visual moment in the chaotic swirl of daily experience. His photographs combine formal precision and vivid color with a strong interest in the joys and ironies of daily life.

First Communion is one of Larry Fink's earliest photographs, yet it already reveals his fascination with the way a person's stance and gestures reveal his or her character. In the mid-1970s, Fink (b. 1941) began prowling around parties, weddings and family gatherings with his camera. He holds a high flash out to the side of the frame, casting deep shadows across the subject and into the corners of the composition. The resulting images highlight the tense drama underlying everyday social encounters. Larry Fink's photographs were widely seen in his 1984 book Social Graces. He teaches photography at Bard College in Annandale, New York.

Evelyn Hofer (b. 1937) emigrated from Germany to New York as a young woman. She has photographed for more than forty years. Her long career includes early fashion shoots for Harper's Bazaar, books of photographs taken in Italy and Spain, and portraits and interiors for magazines such as Vogue and House and Garden. Her photograph Girl in the Coombe, Dublin was one of many she took for the English novelist V. S. Pritchett's 1967 work, Dublin: A Portrait.

Chris Killip (b. 1946) is recognized as a leader of the generation of socially conscious photographers that emerged in Britain in the late 1980s. The son of farmers on the Isle of Man, he apprenticed himself to a commercial photographer in London and then returned to capture the economic hardships of his native land. After the publication of his 1988 book In Flagrante, which chronicled the effects of economic and industrial decline on the people of northeast England, Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson award for documentary photography. His photographs in this exhibition reveal the resilient spirit of children in the remote, struggling coastal communities of England. Since 1991, Killip has taught photography in Harvard University's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

In 1985, Reagan Louie (b. 1951) accompanied his father on his first trip back to China in sixty years. The trip gave the artist a new sense of what his father had lost when he left his village in Southern China as a young man and came to find work in the Chinese immigrant communities of California. Louie's family spoke Chinese at home and maintained many Chinese traditions. Louie associated his decision to become an artist with a rejection of his culture, since his parents wanted him to enter a more traditional profession such as medicine or law. Photographing China helped him bring together the separate worlds of his family and his art. Louie has returned to China several times.

Martino Marangoni (b. 1950) studied photography at the Pratt Institute in New York. In 1989 he set up the Studio Marangoni - Iniziative di Fotografia Contemporanea, a teaching center in Florence. Marangoni acts as a major proponent of Italian photography, organizing exhibitions at photography festivals and art institutions around the world.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, Mary Ellen Mark (b. 1940) crafts vivid portraits of people on the margins of society. She has published photo essays on Mother Teresa, homelessness in the United States, people living with mental disabilities and mental illnesses, and Indian circus performers. Mark is particularly known for her perceptive and surprising images of children. This exhibition also includes a picture from her series on retired seniors in Florida. Mark says that her most difficult project she ever attempted was a photo essay on Aryan Nation gatherings, because her distaste for the group's teachings hindered her from developing the empathy she usually feels for her subjects.

Brazilian-born photographer Mario Cravo Neto (b. 1947) began his formal art training in sculpture at the age of seventeen. In 1968 Neto moved to New York to study at the Art Students' League. Camera 35 magazine published a series of his color photographs, "On the Subway," In 1975 Neto took a break from photographing street scenes after a car accident temporarily impaired both of his legs. During this time, he turned to studio setups including live models and found objects. Today Neto¹s work covers themes from ethnic and religious heritage, to the aesthetics of surface structures, to the relationship between spirituality and the familiarity of every day life. In Akira, Neto creates a luminous and subtly textured image of an infant's forehead and eye.

Famous for his photographs of Americans and American landscapes, Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944) here turns his attention to Ireland, country with historically close ties to the United States. In this photograph, two young people, perhaps Irish, sit looking out towards the west. They are facing both the sun and America. However, instead of yearning after the opportunities traditionally associated with emigration to the United States, they seem content to stay where they are.

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RELIGION

Belgian photojournalist Carl De Keyzer (b. 1958) was awarded the W. Eugene Smith grant to help him in his search for images that describe, in his words, "the very delicate subject of religion in America." De Keyzer spent thirteen months criss-crossing the United States in a Winnebago to visit churches and religious rallies. Published as the book God, Inc., De Keyzer's photographs explore the ways that religion intersects with American nationalism, commerce, and popular culture. An image of ice fishers in Leningrad, taken as part of De Keyzer's project on Glasnost-era Soviet culture, also appears in this exhibition.

English photographer Adam Fuss (b. 1961) is known for his innovative work with pinhole cameras and photograms. Untitled (faceless prophet preaching to the masses) is part of a series of photograms Fuss made of broken stained-glass windows he salvaged from ruined churches. Photograms are created without a camera: the artist places objects directly on photographic paper and then exposes the paper to light. Fuss has created photograms of the tracks left by snakes crawling through powder he spread on the paper. In another series, he placed a tank of water over the paper and captured the shadows of babies as they played in the water. Fuss is particularly interested in the colors that are produced when the chemicals in organic materials react with the chemicals in the photographic paper. His Love series featured the brightly-colored marks left by the entrails of eviscerated rabbits.

Flor Garduno (b. 1957) studied photography at the School of Fine Arts of the National University of Mexico in Mexico City. In 1986, she settled in Switzerland, where she works as a free-lance photographer. Her work has been featured at the Mois de la Photo in Paris (1986) and the Fotofest in Houston, Texas (1992). In 1987, Garduno received the Special Award of the Jury at the Fribourg Biennale. Garduño took Taito Marcos, Ecuador as part of a series of photographs documenting the survival of indigenous traditions in Central America. This series was published as the book Witnesses of Time (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992).

Alex Harris (b. 1949) first came to New Mexico in 1972 to photograph elderly people for noted psychologist Robert Coles's book The Old Ones. Drawn to the beauty of the mountains in northern New Mexico and the quiet strength of the people he met, the artist decided to move to a rural village. He bought a house and invited his friends, author William deBuys and painter Anne deBuys, to help him work the land. While Harris has traveled widely, his photographs in this exhibition were both taken near his home. In Camposanto, El Valle, New Mexico, Harris depicts the graveyard in his hometown of El Valle. The soil of the graveyard is hard and pebbly, so for most of the year, the only flowers on the graves are plastic ones, like those that hang on the picket fence in the foreground. Only in July, after the summer rains, do bright yellow sunflowers bloom on the graves. Harris also shows us religious figures placed alongside the breakfast cereals in the home of Rosenda Medina, a resident of the nearby village of Penasco.

Suzanne Bloom (b. 1943) and Edward Hill (b. 1935) chose the name Manual for themselves because it connotes both physical labor and informative texts. The pair met when they were teaching at Smith College in the mid 1970s. They moved together to the University of Houston, Texas in 1976. They collaborate on computer-generated images, videos, and installations. They also promote new investigations into digital art through their online Digital Image Forum. Bloom and Hill are currently working on a series of public artworks for the city of Houston.

When he was released from the army after the Korean War, Duane Michals (b. 1932) trained as a graphic designer at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He decided to pursue photography instead after seeing the images he shot on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1958. By the early 1970s, Michals was mounting solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the George Eastman House. As in Grandpa Goes to Heaven and I Build a Pyramid (downstairs), Michals creates brief sequences of images that tell a story. Charged with metaphor and humor, each photo story is more like a poem than like a scene from a movie.

After receiving his MFA from the University of New Mexico, Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) moved to Massachusetts to teach at the Massachusetts College of Art. Tom Moran, G. Braintree, Massachusetts is part of a continuing series on AIDS patients. Nixon visited people with AIDS at regular monthly or weekly intervals, creating a vivid record of their courage and dignity in the face of impending death. This exhibition also includes Clementine, Cambridge and Mary Lee with Joy Chase, RN, Cambridge.

Sylvia Plachy (b. 1943) left Stalinist Hungary at the age of thirteen, hiding under the corn in a farmer's cart to make it through the checkpoint at the border. She brings the same courage to her photography, making an adventure out of meeting new people and photographing new places. She took Ghost of A Star, Budapest, an evocative image of a sliver of light falling on an ornate floor, on a return trip to Hungary.

For thirty years now, Cristina Garcia Rodero (b. 1949) has documented the religious customs of Spain. During the festival of Corpus Christi, in the town of Castrillo de Murcia in northern Spain, a man dresses up as El Colacho, or the devil. At the end of the festival procession, his mask is removed, symbolizing Christ's victory over Satan. As El Colacho flees the procession, he leaps over all the infants that were born in the past year. In this way, the town celebrates Christ's protection of all children from the power of Satan. While she is better known for her vivid pictures of masks, processions, and folk rituals, Rodero also explores the everyday life of believers. In La Confession, Saavedra, she captures a woman's fervent prayer for forgiveness.

Thomas Roma (b. 1950) discovered photography at the age of nineteen. Recuperating at home from a severe head injury, he asked his older brother for a camera. His first photographs were of the neighborhood outside his window. Since then, Roma has never strayed far from home in his art. Rather than traveling the globe to find compelling subjects, he explores the unique visual world of his hometown of Brooklyn. In the early 1990s, Roma decided that he wanted to bring spirituality into his work. He began by taking photographs of empty churches and synagogues, but changed direction after a minister invited him to photograph during the Sunday service. For the next three years, Roma photographed over 150 Sunday services in fifty-two African American churches in Brooklyn.Inspired by a pastor's reference to his parishioners as saints, Roma attempted to bring out the holiness of ordinary worshippers like the praying woman shown here.

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) remarks, "My photographs aren¹t really about any particular story, but about roles." Each image of the Unfinished Film Stills series teases the viewer, suggesting a larger story but refusing to offer any further details. Inspired by the enticing advertisements for B-movies, Sherman created photographs of imagined films, The artist casts herself as "The Girl," the female lead of second-rate films, often in some kind of trouble. The series occupied Sherman's artistic energies for about three years. She says that she only stopped making images when she "ran out of clichés."

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NATURE

Robert Adams (b. 1937) moved to Denver, Colorado when he was fifteen. As a young man, he spent his summers river rafting and working for the United States Forest Service. Inspired by Ansel Adams's work, he began photographing the Western landscape in 1963. In this exhibition, his photograph Dove Eggs, The Pawnee Grasslands, Colorado, 1984 captures the fragile beginning of life in a harsh desert landscape. Robert Adams' documentary photographs of life in the Denver suburbs also recall the Depression-era images of Dorothea Lange.

Circus Performer, Havana, Cuba is part of Ernesto Bazan's project to document the culture of his native Cuba. In 1998, he won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography to photograph the ways Cuba has changed since the end of the Soviet Union. According to Bazan (b. 1970s), "there is a feeling of hopelessness and utter despair, yet Cubans have maintained reserves of inner strength, a profound sense of dignity. A great love of life remains."

American photographer Ellen Binder (b. 1960) offers us the surprising image of a young man carrying a sapling in his backpack. Binder was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 1994 to continue her work in Russia. She began this project on her own initiative in 1991, the last year of the Soviet Union's existence. Her work explores this deeply wounded nation's struggles since the end of Communism. Binder focuses on the daily lives of ordinary Russians, documenting the ways that they work, rest and seek escape from the degradation of their society.

In 1941, Harry Callahan (b. 1912) attended a photography workshop led by Ansel Adams. Inspired by Adams' images, he bought a camera and began to shoot pictures. By 1961, he was the chair of the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective of his work. The next year, Callahan surprised the art world by retiring from RISD and beginning to photograph exclusively in color. In 1996, Callahan was awarded the National Medal of Arts and a retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. Although Callahan began his career in the 1940s and 50s, a period known for socially conscious photography, he produces highly aesthetic images that often verge on abstraction. In Atlanta, a set of four pristine shots of tree branches against a pale sky, Callahan emphasizes the bold lines of the branches and the shifting patterns of the leaves.

William Clift's photographs have been compared to the work of Minor White, since both artists use photography as a medium for expressing inner, spiritual realities. A native of Boston, Clift (b. 1944) asked his grandmother for a camera and home darkroom kit at the age of ten. At nineteen, he started a professional photography business. His first major commissions came in the 1970s, when he completed photo essays on the abandoned Boston City Hall, the capitol buildings of New York State, and courthouses around the country. In the mid 1970s, Clift moved to Santa Fe. Using an eight by ten inch view camera, he shoots romantic, monumental, and exquisitely detailed Western vistas like Rainbow, Waldo, New Mexico.

William Eggleston (b. 1939) was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation. He began photographing the rural South at he age of 18. Rejecting the romantic idea of the South as a land of gracefully decaying mansions and country stores, Eggleston creates vivid images of shopping malls and suburban sprawl. His work in this exhibition, Nashville, Tennessee, gently pokes fun at suburban homeowners who have cut a window into the roof of their modest home to show off their prized chandelier. In the mid-1970s, Eggleston began photographing exclusively in color. His 1976 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, William Eggleston's Guide, challenged the prevailing view that color film was too vulgar to be a medium for artistic expression.

A star is born when a cloud of inter-stellar gas and dust collapses under the force of gravity, igniting a fusion reaction. The process produces jets of gaseous material, which burn brightly in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Jeff Hester began working with the Hubble team in 1985 as a postdoctoral assistant. When the Hubble's first images came out blurry, he was part of the team that created a new camera for the satellite telescope. Dr. Hester is widely respected for his research on star formation. His space photographs have appeared in many scientific journals, in popular magazines, and on two postage stamps.

Mark Klett's photograph Contemplating the View at Muley Point, Utah mimics many of the conventions of nineteenth-century landscape photography. Klett (b. 1949) encountered the work of early geologic survey photographers while he was working as a government geologist in Colorado. In 1977, he brought together a team of artists and scientists to photograph the same vistas that the photographers William Henry Jackson, Andrew Russell, and Timothy O'Sullivan took during the 1860-1880 geologic surveys of the western states. The Rephotographic Survey Project required extensive searches for the original sites and careful calculation of the nineteenth-century photographers' exact vantage points. Placed alongside the originals, the rephotographs provide vivid evidence of changes in the American landscape over the last century. Since the late 1970s, Klett has continued to rephotograph early landscape pictures, as well as capturing original images of human interaction with the western landscape.

Koichiro Kurita (b. 1943) brings a distinctively Japanese aesthetic sensibility to his photographs of the New England landscape. Cascade, Massachusetts reveals his fascination with the interdependence of the natural world. In the constant motion of the flowing stream, the edges of boundaries of rocks and water seem to dissolve into one another. Like the surprise ending of a haiku, the photograph rewards the viewer's patience with a charming detail: in the midst the cascade, a tiny plant is bravely setting down roots.

Like his contemporaries, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938) worked in the documentary tradition. In the mid 1970s, however, Meyerowitz decided to challenge himself using an eight by ten inch view camera. The long shutter speeds of the large-format camera forced him to slow down. Rather than capturing the fleeting instances of human interaction, he began composing meditative images of the Cape Cod landscape. Fascinated by the way photography can create a deep sense of place, Meyerowitz has gone on to create portraits of Saint Louis, Missouri and Atlanta.

Richard Misrach (b. 1949) grew up in southern California, where he developed a love for the desert landscape. Since he began studying photography at Berkeley in the late 1960s, he has photographed every aspect of the desert, from the terrain and the clouds to the landfills and the nuclear testing grounds. He has also founded an organization for nuclear disarmament activism. Misrach shows a remarkable devotion to photography despite facing numerous hardships, including a 1982 fire that destroyed 4,000 original negatives.

Patrick Nagatani (b. 1945) is best known for his collaborative work with Andree Tracey. In his solo projects, Nagatani finds the humor in such issues as nuclear weapons, mass destruction, and urban isolation. The piece Solitario / Soledad illustrates Nagatani playing a game of solitaire while being examined by his own image. Nagatani teaches photography at the University of New Mexico.

Barbara Norfleet (b. 1926) is the founding director of the Photography Collection at Harvard University. When the artist's children were young, she used to take them to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. The children were particularly fascinated by the insects on display. They began insect collections of their own, and soon were winning prizes at local fairs. Norfleet attempted many pictures of live insects, but found that the tiny creatures moved out of the frame too quickly. She ordered some dried specimens of beetles and other insects from an entomological catalog instead. Norfleet arranges the insects in humorous scenes reminiscent of Aesop's animal fables.

Evan Sklar (b. 1965) is just beginning his career as a commercial photographer. Since 1995, he has published photographs in home, travel and lifestyle magazines. Sklar's photographs of food have illustrated two cookbooks and numerous articles in such magazines as Gourmet, Food and Wine, and Martha Stewart Living.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) left Japan in 1972 to study art in Los Angeles. He began photographing seascapes from around the world in the late 1970s. Interested in Minimalism, the artist reduces the sea to simple planes and minute transitions between shades of grey. Sugimoto's images of the sea at night are particularly subtle, the rich blackness of the prints broken only by pale glimmers of moonlight reflecting off the waves. Using only naturally available light, Sugimoto exposes the film of his eight by ten inch view camera for as long as two or three hours. Because the seascapes rely on small variations in value, even a small imperfection in the film, the lens, the photographic paper, or the application of the photographic emulsions can ruin the finished image.

JoAnn Verburg (b. 1950) grew up in New Jersey. Since the mid-1970s, she has instigated, curated and co-created a variety of ambitious projects. She created the visiting artists' program at Polaroid following the invention of the twenty by twenty-four inch land camera. She worked alongside artists such as Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, William Wegman and Jan Groover amongst others. She also worked with Mark Klett on the Rephotographic Survey Project. Verburg¹s pictures of Chaco Canyon evoke the sensory pleasure of the natural world. Through this image of a woman crouching to look at a pebble, she reminds us of our own physicality. We remember what it feels like to look carefully at natural forms, breathing in the dust and pollen, hearing the birds and insects. Verburg hopes to show us the splendor of being incarnate and of living in the moment.

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INVENTION

To create the images in his Guest series, Christopher Bucklow (b. 1957) traced the outline of a person onto a sheet of tin or silver foil. He then punched thousands of tiny holes within the traced shape. These holes became the apertures for a large pinhole camera. When Bucklow placed the camera in sunlight, each tiny hole projected a separate image of the sun onto photographic paper. By varying the size of the holes, Bucklow creates the illusion of a three-dimensional body made up of discrete points of light. Bucklow relates his images to Christian mystical writings, and in particular to the idea that Christ is the Word or Light of God made flesh. Alongside this religious conception of the body, Bucklow's work also explores the revelatory power of scientific discovery.

Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) began work as a professional photographer in 1948, when he was only fourteen. In 1956, he moved from Washington State to New York City and began photographing jazz musicians for Atlantic Records. He went on to become one of the most respected documentary photographers of his generation. He coined the term "social landscapes" to describe his portraits of American society.

In 1982, American Photographer, a journal for commercial photographers, devoted an entire issue to Hiro. On the cover, next to the artist's self-portrait, was the question "Is this Man America's Greatest Photographer?" Yasuhiro Wakabayashi (b. 1930), known as Hiro, immigrated to the United States in 1954 and enrolled in the School of Modern Photography in California. In 1956, Richard Avedon accepted him as an assistant. He progressed so quickly that within months Avedon decided he should be doing independent work. Hiro took a job as a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar, working under the direction of Alexey Brodovitch from 1956 to 1975. Now a freelance commercial photographer, Hiro is known for his highly original images and his ability to precisely manipulate every aspect of his subject, lighting, and technology to achieve the right effect. Hiro's interest in space led him to attend the launching of Apollo 11 at Cape Canaveral in 1969. Upon his return to New York, he convinced Harper's Bazaar to run a full-page image of the photograph seen in this exhibition. Hiro shot the rocket's launch with infrared film, producing vivid green and yellow tones that evoke the visceral roar of the engine.

Karen Kasmauski (b. 1953) studied anthropology and religion at the University of Michigan before deciding to become a professional photographer. Her image of a woman holding a bouquet of flowers as she watches workers clear away the rubble from the 1995 Kobe earthquake was taken as part of an in-depth study of Japan for National Geographic. Kasmauski is particularly interested in the ways human beings use science as a tool to better understand ourselves. Kasmauski's work can be seen in the book Women Photographers at National Geographic (2000).

Michael Kenna (b. 1953) studied photography at the London College of Printing. After the death of British photographer Bill Brandt in 1983, Kenna spent four years photographing the Lancashire industrial sites that Brandt shot in the 1930s. Kenna creates images of manufactured spaces devoid of people, but full of the energy of human creativity. As in Eiffel Tower Study 3, he chooses unexpected vistas and mysterious effects of light.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was born into a wealthy French family. His father gave him his first camera in 1901, when he was only seven years old. Lartigue immediately decided to capture everything he could on film. He was particularly fascinated by machines, from racing cars to the early plane seen in this exhibition. Lartigue continued to take pictures throughout his life, but put much of his energy into a modestly successful career as a painter. He was nearly seventy years old before a small portfolio of his early photographs came to the attention of Jon Szarkowski, the influential director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He contacted Lartigue to discuss some later pictures, but quickly became entranced by the photographs from Lartigue's youth. In 1963, the MoMA mounted a major exhibition of Lartigue's photographs from the beginning of the century.

Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morrell (b. 1948), who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Arts, has received a great deal of attention in recent years. For example, Boston Magazine named his exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the best photography exhibitions of 1999. Morrell is known for his photographs of old books and maps and his experiments with pinhole cameras. He also illustrated a 1999 edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Like the great magical realists of Latin American literature, Morrell transforms ordinary objects and spaces into mysterious scenes.

While taking close-up photographs of animals in the 1950s, the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (b. 1922) began to wonder how one would take a photograph of internal organs. Working with a team of doctors and advanced medical technology, he has meticulously photographed every aspect of human biology, from our immune response to bacteria to the internal structures of the lungs and the intestines. His most famous photographs appeared in the book A Child is Born, which chronicled the development of the human fetus from conception to birth. He is widely respected both for his innovative photography and for his efforts to educate the wider public about human biology and health.

Museum visitors are a recurring theme in the work of German photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954). The artist works in a documentary style, capturing the chance interactions of urban environments. In the early 1980's, the artist discovered that the galleries of public art museums were as rich with human drama as any city street. When Struth juxtaposes living human beings with painted images of people, both take on new meaning: the museum visitor becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation, while the painted figures appear to participate in the world outside the canvas.

Catherine Wagner (b. 1953) investigates the intersection of art and science. Her subject matter spans from post-industrial landscapes to the invisible natural phenomena that influence human life. In the photographs exhibited here, she explores the forms of chemical beakers and the textures of the compounds they contain.

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) was introduced to photography in his twenties at Columbia University. He was soon shooting freelance assignments for a variety of clients, including Collier¹s and Harper¹s Bazaar. After seeing the book American Photographs by Walker Evans and taking his first cross-country trip in 1955, Winogrand began to challenge the boundaries of journalistic practice. Every day, Winogrand strapped on his Leica, lens pre-focused, and shot ten rolls of film capturing daily activities around him. His images have a spontaneous quality, and were often shot at odd angles. Winogrand's obsessive process yielded new ways of viewing American life that, in the words of one curator, "brought a new visual order to the chaos of modern street life and contemporary American culture."

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RISK - TAKING

In 1985, Henry Horenstein (b. 1947) took photographs at eleven racetracks around the United States, including the Keeneland track in Lexington, Kentucky. He was inspired by his own love of horse racing: he has lost as much as $600 and won as much as $2500 on a day's bets. Horenstein is the author of two photography textbooks and several children's books, including Sam Goes Trucking (1989), How are Sneakers Made? (1993), My Mom's a Vet (1994) and A is forþ?: A photographer's alphabet of animals.

Andrea Modica's best-known body of work is a series of intimate yet enigmatic photographs of an overweight young girl, Barbara, in a rural area of upstate New York. Modica (b. 1960) moved upstate from Brooklyn in 1986, when she accepted a teaching job at the State University of New York in Oneanta. Oneanta, New York is part of a series of images she took of the players on the minor league team in Oneanta, which at that time was a farm team for the New York Yankees.

From 1985 to 1997, Christine Osinski (b. 1948) created images of female swimmers from age seven to age seventy. Many of her subjects were members of an amateur synchronized swimming club in Staten Island, New York. Osinski's portraits present a vision of female beauty and athleticism that includes women of all ages and all body types.

In addition to being a respected photographer, Miguel Rio Branco (b. 1946) is an award-winning director and cinematographer of Brazilian films. His photographs often have a cinematic quality, with fluid edges that suggest motion and intense, saturated colors. Rio Branco explores life on the streets of São Paulo, revealing his subjects' dignity in the face of poverty, loneliness, and violence. The artist is particularly interested in violent sports such as boxing and the Brazilian martial art capoeira.

Brad Richman (b. 1971) spent four years photographing at basketball courts in and around his hometown of Silver Spring, Maryland. Beginning with a thirty-five millimeter camera, Richman soon switched to a four by five inch camera. Richman would set up his camera just to the right or left of the basket and wait. His goal was not to catch the game-winning basket or the perfect play, but to capture the culture of basketball and the inherent beauty of the game. Richman went on to photograph neighborhood pickup games in forty states over nine years. America's Game: Basketball Photographs by Brad Richman is on display through December 31, 2001 at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA.

Finnish photographer Stig Stasig (b. 1961) has traveled to Russia many times beginning in 1988. He published his early pictures from Russia as The Experiment - Images of the Soviet Union. This photograph was taken on the beach at Sochi, a Russian resort town on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Arthur Aviles is related to images of dancers Philip Trager (b. 1953) made for Persephone, a piece choreographed in 1991 by Ralph Lemon. Trager worked with Lemon to create a series of photographic tableaux based on the choreography. Set in the natural beauty of the Berkshires, the photographs capture the dancers in moments of joyful movement. Comfortably and capably suspended between earth and sky, the figure in this photograph recalls the inherent hopefulness of moments of transition.

Geoff Winningham (b. 1943) is a native of Texas, where high-school football is almost a way of life. In 1969, after he finished his studies at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Winningham returned to Houston and took a teaching position at Rice University. Over the next ten years, he explored Texas culture, taking pictures of rodeos, livestock shows, professional wrestling matches, and high school football games. He was particularly interested in the ritual aspects of football, from the prayer before the game to pep rallies and victory celebrations. In this image from his series Rites of Fall, Winningham captures a match between Lexington and Franklin, two neighboring towns that lie northwest of Houston.

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