The Ongoing Moment: Recent Acquisitions of Photography at the Loeb
One of the most enduring ideas about photography is that it can capture what photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.” This phrase has long been a touchstone for thinking about photographs as moments frozen in time, which create instant visual records of the past. However, Cartier-Bresson also acknowledged that photographs are often carefully considered and composed, and therefore not simply transparent or objective visual evidence. Even when a candid moment is captured on camera, the resulting image becomes layered with associations, symbolism, and misunderstandings. Each photograph is part of a longer, larger narrative—what art historian and critic Geoff Dyer has called “the ongoing moment.” Dyer has traced how similar kinds of images show up again and again in photography throughout history. These repetitions remind us that images become part of shared consciousness and trajectories of collective experience.
Dawoud Bey, Mary Ellen Mark, Carrie Mae Weems, Aaron Turner, and Ray Metzker negotiate the instantaneous and the enduring, the candid and the composed, the present and the past. In their photographs, familiar settings such as city streets or kitchen tables allude to stories that extend far beyond the frame. Cognizant that images made with a camera are constructed and subjective, these photographers demonstrate how photography can extend time rather than freeze it. While the works on view by Bey and Mark come from a documentary tradition, Weems and Turner offer artistic expressions of how the past and present can converge in a single photograph. Metzker’s work is somewhere in between; he played with formal abstraction in picturing the daily bustle of the urban street. For all of these photographers, specific subject matter stands in for broader ideas about history and humanity, and their work presents seemingly familiar images that reward close looking.
The photographs in this exhibition, in conjunction with those displayed in the In The Spotlight gallery, were recently acquired as part of the Loeb Art Center’s permanent collection of photography. By exhibiting these works together, we hope to illuminate the process by which curators choose works of art to enter the museum's collection. Together these works add to the collection’s deep holdings of contemporary art and documentary photography and strengthen the representation of women and artists of color in the collection.
This exhibition was generously supported by the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.
