WASHINGTON, DC.- Posing for the Camera: Gifts from Robert B. Menschel explores posing in photography and examines how photographers have both drawn on artistic conventions and exploited the collaborative nature of the medium to create probing portraits of their subjects. A selection of some 70 photographs, either acquired with funds from Robert B. Menschel or pledged as gifts from his personal collection, examines the many forms portraits have taken throughout the history of the medium: as means to define one's understanding of another person or one's own identity, a device to elucidate cultural issues, documents of historical moments, and resources for educational and scientific purposes. It also illustrates the ways in which photographers have used a figure's unconscious pose to create striking depictions of contemporary life.
On view in the West Building of the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 17, 2017, through January 28, 2018, Posing for the Camera features pictures from the early 1840s through the 1990s by photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, James Van Der Zee, Brassaï, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, and Cindy Sherman, as well as scientists, commercial practitioners, and amateurs. Many of the works are on view for the first time, including examples by Lewis Carroll, Edward Weston, and Man Ray. Carrie Mae Weems' Kitchen Table Series (1990)—a recent acquisition made possible by Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund, and the Collectors Committee—is also on view in the East Building throughout the run of the exhibition.
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