Elizabeth Shannon, PhD
Collections Curator
Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art
Hamilton College
Overview
Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning, from the Wellin Museum’s Collection explores how photographers use images presented in series, at times juxtaposed with text, to create narratives and communicate a particular message. While a single image can tell a story, the cumulative presentation of pictures, and text, often enables the generation of more layered, nuanced, and powerful ideas. A single image may communicate a concept that is destabilized by the picture that follows. Similarly, a text may reinforce—or undermine—the apparent message of an image, or series of images.
The American photographers featured in this exhibition deploy different creative strategies in their use of images and text, to communicate their visions of the world. Some pictures were created specifically for publication in magazines or photobooks, often presented alongside a text authored by the photographer, or a writer who might have worked in collaboration with the image-maker. The author’s voice may significantly alter the viewer’s understanding of the visual material. Moreover, decisions relating to presentation, such as scale, graphic design, font, and even the paper on which a work is printed, potentially impact the character of the message transmitted by the material. As this show demonstrates, tremendously diverse bodies of work can be created from the basic elements of pictures and text.
The exhibition presents photographs by celebrated twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures such as Danny Lyon, Wright Morris, Bill Owens, Gordon Parks, Milton Rogovin, Silvia Saunders, Lorna Simpson, and Garry Winogrand, among others, drawn from the collection of the Wellin Museum of Art.