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news release The Metropolitan Museum of Art Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel 212-570-3951 fax 212-472-2764 For Immediate Release email [email protected] Contact: Elyse Topalian Rebecca Herman

Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Inaugural Installation

Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan September 25, 2007 - March 23, 2008

Wall Text Sc Labels Introductory Wall Text

This inaugural installation surveys some of the diverse ways contemporary artists have used the camera since the 1960s, when photography played an instrumental role in breaking down the previously well-maintained boundaries between media. The photographic image—mechanically produced, endlessly reproducible, and found in every corner of the culture—was of central importance in dismantling age- old hierarchies, challenging notions of authorship and originality, and radically redefining what constituted a work of art in postwar society. A painting by Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol could be a coolly distanced grisaille of a humble snapshot or a silkscreen grid of grisly tabloid outtakes, while the traditional work of sculpture was displaced in two diametrically opposed directions: toward the artist's body as subject, object, and implicit point of reference; and outward to ephemeral, site- specific interventions into the landscape, both of which were dependent on the photograph to extend the life of the artist's fleeting gestures.

Photography by artists who were not trained photographers in turn freed the medium from some its own timeworn clichés of expressivity. The photograph in series—deliberately pokerfaced studies of snow melting off a bush by Douglas Huebler or of water towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher—undercut the autonomy and singularity of the single image in favor of typological accumulations, serial progressions, or narrative sequences that required the active participation of the viewer in the making of meaning. The late 1970s saw a renewed interest in the psychological, social, and rhetorical functions of imagery, and artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince used the camera to show how representations shape our sense of self and the world around us, and not vice versa. In the new decade, the scale and ambition of photography expanded dramatically, absorbing elements of painting, performance, and cinema to make highly seductive pictures with enough power and impact to break through the passivity and habit of a culture addicted to the consumption of images.

The accelerated pace of technological change during the 1990s greatly transformed the way visual information was perceived and processed, with the line between reality and the imagination becoming increasingly blurred. The hallucinatory clarity of Rodney Graham's upside-down tree, Sharon Lockhart's reflection-filled hotel room, and Uta Barth's sensuous river view is, nevertheless, rooted in an exploration of analog photography's unique technical and material underpinnings, pushed to the point of bedazzled transcendence. This fervent experimentalism, combined with a profound understanding of the medium's complex history and relationship to other media, provides a template for the works of photographic art to be featured in this new hall. Wall Labels

Dennis Oppenheim (American, born 1938) Annual Rings, 1969 Mixed media Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999 (1999.212)

During the 1960s artists such as Oppenheim and Robert Smithson sought to liberate sculpture from the pedestals of the gallery and museum, choosing instead to make ephemeral, antimonumental works inextricably bound to their sites in the world. Here, Oppenheim enlarged the patterns of a tree's growth and, by shoveling pathways in the snow, transposed the annual rings to the frozen waterway that separates the United States and Canada as well as their differing time zones. By juxtaposing man-made national and temporal boundaries, Oppenheim opened to question the relative values of the ordering systems by which we live.

Douglas Huebler (American, 1924-1997) Duration Piece #31, Bradford, Massachusetts, 1969 Gelatin silver prints and typescript Purchase, Anonymous Foundation, Marian and James H. Cohen, in memory of their son Michael Harrison Cohen, Saundra B. Lane and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2004 (2004.51a, b)

Huebler, who began his career as a Minimalist sculptor, explained his reasons for abandoning the making of traditional art objects: "The world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add anymore. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place." The results—typewritten, bureaucratic-sounding texts accompanied by deadpan black-and-white photographs—were divided into three decade-long series: Duration, Variable (in which he attempted to photograph everyone in the world), and Location.

This work was made in Bradford, Massachusetts, where the artist taught at a liberal-arts college for women. Focusing hypnotically on a snow-laden bush of spiky branches, the artist changed his humdrum subject—photographed twelve times from a fixed position at fifteen-minute intervals— into a readymade sculpture undergoing organic transformation, the various stages of a densely worked drawing, and a mirror in nature on the tonal reversal (from snow white to brush black) that underlies the negative-positive process of the medium. With disarming simplicity, Huebler slyly redrew the parameters of the work of art to efface the traditionally elevated positions of the artist and the art object in favor of an elegantly conceived and simply communicated idea that exists fully only in the viewer's mind. Wall Labels

Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Splitting, 197 A Chromogenic prints Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992 (1992.5067)

Like his contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham, Matta-Clark was instrumental in introducing architecture and public space as important subjects of Conceptual Art. Using abandoned buildings as his medium and wielding a chain saw as his instrument, he cut into structures, creating unexpected apertures and incisions. In 1974 Matta-Clark operated on a two- story home in New Jersey that was slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle. The light from the incision invaded the interior and united the rooms with a swath of brilliance. The artist photographed his work and created a collage of prints, the unconventional disposition of which re-creates the disorienting experience of the unprecedented destruction.

Charles Ray (American, born 1953) Untitled, 1973; printed 1989 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Robert Shapazian Gift, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 1995 (1995.474)

Unnoticed except for a few passersby, Ray spent an afternoon bound to a tree branch. Coming on the heels of the coolly inhuman Minimalist art that reigned during the preceding decade, the artist's gesture (executed to be memorialized as a photograph) inextricably binds the human body to the medium of sculpture. It is also a witty self-portrait of the artist as hapless prisoner to his own creativity that, in the manner of a good joke, leaves the viewer somewhere between amusement and concern.

Trisha Donnelly (American, born 1974) Satin Operator (11), 2007 Inkjet print Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2007 (2007.336) Exhibition print courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan

Donnelly is best known for her performances, which are novel partly because they are rigorously undocumented—meant to exist for whomever is present and to be communicated to those who are not by word of mouth, with all of the accretions and distortions of subsequent legend. To further complicate matters, she has also performed without informing the audience, as when she waited on tables at the dinner for the opening of the Fifty-fourth Carnegie International (in which her work was included) like a ghost visiting her own funeral. This withdrawal of the camera from the event points to her own ambivalence about the medium, as can be seen in the series of twelve unique prints collectively entitled Satin Operator. The artist created each image by manipulating a rolled photograph on a flatbed scanner during exposure. The resulting variations are like individual performances that are then presented by the artist without mat or frame, pinned directly to the wall so that the work protrudes into the space of the viewer like a character in an unfolding drama. Wall Labels

Rodney Graham (Canadian, born 1949) Welsh Oaks #1, 1998 Chromogenic print Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002 (2002.381)

Graham, an artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of media, built a giant pinhole camera and parked it in front of twelve different trees for one month in 1979. The public was invited to enter the camera to view the luminous image of the tree cast upside-down on the camera's back wall. In the early 1990s he again approached the subject, this time photographing ancient oaks in the English countryside. Inverted on gallery walls, the impressively large prints suspended the trees as if in the mind while insistently recalling the constructed aspect of all artistic representation.

In 1998 Graham produced his definitive work on this theme, a series of seven monumental images of Welsh oaks printed on color paper to produce warm deep sepia and charcoal hues. The almost hallucinatory transformation wrought by the inversion of these images is profound, as disorienting as if the ground were to become transparent, branches become roots, and the sky fall.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba, 1957-1996) Untitled (Sand), 1993-94 Photogravures Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1995 (1995.263)

Gonzalez-Torres first came to prominence in the early 1990s with his interactive site-specific installations of candy stacks and printed paper. These "antimonuments" parodied the coldness and rigor of Minimalist sculpture while actively encouraging participation by the audience. The photographs in this suite (printed in gravure, a photomechanical process descended from the traditional printmaking technique of etching) show portions of a sandy beach with the layered footprints of those who have walked past. Like his work in sculpture, these images are semi- abstractions that trigger thoughts on the transience of life while also hinting at the structural connection between footprints and photographs—both records of that which is no longer present.

Uta Barth (American, born Federal Republic of Germany, 1958) Untitled (98.2), 1998 Chromogenic prints Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998 (1998.421a, b)

Based in Los Angeles, Barth makes cool, precise works that emphasize processes of perception and vision unique to photography. This diptych shows two adjacent views of a Stockholm river scene captured in soft focus; the right-hand panel, however, reveals a sharply rendered plank—perhaps the strut of a bridge—in the foreground plane. A surprising and complex meditation on figure and ground, surface and depth, this work seamlessly combines luscious, almost painterly effects with an incisive inquiry into the workings of the medium. Wall Labels

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Still Life, New York, 2001 Chromogenic print Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift, 2002 (2002.350)

From the moment of his first exhibition, in 1988, at the age of twenty, Tillmans has been recognized as an artist of precocious talent. Conscripting such magazines such as i-D, Interview, and Index as his exhibition space, he published provocative pictures of youth culture's rituals, self- image, and style that looked nothing like high fashion. Their exciting transgressions and seemingly casual snapshot manner seemed, however, totally appropriate to describing the texture of a nomadic counterculture whose very ethos is the elimination of all boundaries.

Tillmans's firsthand attraction to objects was manifest from the beginning, but his still lifes rarely appeared in his early publications. Refusing to be narrowly cast as a pop culture "art star," Tillmans retrieved and printed his early still lifes in the mid-1990s and began to move deeper into this genre, seeking out the paintings of Zurbarán and Caravaggio. His continuing challenges to distinctions between low and high culture—and, recently, between figuration and abstraction— and the lush beauty of his pictorial results earned him Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, the first time the award had been given to a photographer.

Sigmar Polke (German, born 1941) Untitled, 1975 Gelatin silver print Purchase, David T. Schiff, Lila Acheson Wallace, Harriette and Noel Levine, and Nancy and Edwin Marks Gifts, 1992 (1992.5154)

During the 1970s Polke photographed widely—from Paris and New York to Brazil, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The basis of this image is one of a series of negatives exposed in a bar in Säo Paolo showing a group of men drinking. Polke considers the darkroom a sort of alchemic laboratory in which he can explore infinite mutations of imagery. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed this large sheet selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding wet paper to generate the woozy, hallucinatory forms.

Adam Fuss (English, born 1961) Now!, 1988 Gelatin silver print Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991 (1991.1127)

Fuss's outsized photogram records time and energy rather than material form. His large sheet of photographic paper, floating in a tray of water, was exposed to a bright flash of light at the very moment—Now!—when he splashed a bucket of water onto it. The plunging of the water on the paper's "landscape" and the rippling concentric waves and myriad individual droplets on the water's surface were all recorded on Fuss's sheet, but the abstract pattern seems rather to record the birth of a solar system or the splitting of atoms. Wall Labels

Richard Prince (American, born 1949) Untitled (cowboy), 1989 Chromogenic print Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000 (2000.272)

In the mid-1970s Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy. By 1977 Prince had begun rephotographing these ubiquitous images in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined pictures as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies—blurring, cropping, enlarging—that undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the image, revealing it to be a hallucination, a fiction of society's desires.

Untitled (cowboy) marks a high point in the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy), one used to sell addiction in the guise of rugged independence. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to rampant individualism and illusion, Untitled (cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to images over lived experience.

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) Untitled #87, 1981 Chromogenic print Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, 1995 (1995.16)

In 1981 Sherman created a series of images showing herself squeezed into the horizontal, double- page format of a magazine spread. In each picture, the viewer looms over the subject whose dramatically spot-lit poses—waiting for the phone to ring, crouching in terror, or staring catatonically into space—often imply an air of vulnerability, trauma, and even violence. By encouraging her audience to participate by proxy in the predatory "male gaze" reminiscent of Cinemascope B-movies and pornographic magazines, Sherman courted controversy; some critics felt that the works did not sufficiently stand apart from the objectification that they described so powerfully, and the magazine that commissioned them ultimately rejected them for publication. Wall Labels

Sharon Lockhart (American, born 1964) Untitled, 1996 Chromogenic print Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2004 (2004.62)

Lockhart is a Los Angeles-based photographer and filmmaker whose work draws on and extends the strain of Western visual culture characterized by precise, contemplative observation of the everyday, from northern European paintings by Vermeer and Friedrich to the structuralist and ethnographic cinema of Michael Snow and Jean Rouch. Known for her "directorial" style of location scouting and obsessively realized mise-en-scènes, the artist displays a bravura talent for atmospheric and psychological effects, redolent with mystery, that both provoke and frustrate the viewer's desire for narrative resolution. This work is a remarkable reading lesson in the nature of photographic representation, with its play of reflections and doublings across a grid of windows that thrusts the protagonist forward into our space, as if he stood with us before this rain-soaked bedroom/skyline conflating interior and exterior—imagination and reality—onto a single plane.

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, born 1959) Kolobrzeg, Poland, 1992 Chromogenic print Purchase, Roy R. and Marie S. Neuberger Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Joseph Duke, Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz and Anne Marie MacDonald Gifts, 2001 (2001.307)

Between 1992 and 1996 Dijkstra produced a series of full-length portraits of teenagers on various beaches in Poland, Croatia, the Ukraine, Belgium, England, and America, describing the liminal state of adolescence with startling eloquence. Posing her young subjects before a luminous background of sand, sea, and sky, she imbues the portraits with an elemental, almost mythic quality that seems to transcend the carefully observed particulars of national identity and class.

In this photograph, a skinny Polish girl in a lime-green bathing suit confronts the camera with a heartbreaking blend of awkwardness and studied nonchalance. Standing at the ocean's edge, she tilts her head and slips unconsciously into a classical contrapposto pose. Dijkstra captures this moment with her camera, deftly revealing the eterna! within the everyday. Shot from a low angle against a darkening sky, the girl appears simultaneously large and small—monumental yet vulnerable, half exposed, half grown, halfway between innocence and experience. With its perfectly modulated blend of clarity and ambiguity, the photograph is a poignant depiction of Venus at the awkward age. Wall Labels

Thomas Ruff (German, bom 1958) Jpeg ny02, 2004 Chromogenic print Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift; Marlene Nathan Meyerson Gift, in memory of Andrew H. Gotkin; Pamela and Arthur Sanders, The Robert A. and Renée E. Belfer Family Foundation, and Neil C. S. Hirsch Gifts; and Marian and James H. Cohen Gift, in memory of their son, Michael Harrison Cohen, 2006 (2006.92)

For more than two decades Ruff has been interested in how technology colors our perceptions. Entitled jpeg to indicate the digital pictures from which they are derived, his newest body of work greatly expands the matrix of individual pixels in low-resolution files lifted from the Internet. The abstract, nearly dematerialized quality of this photograph recalls other images of catastrophe such as J. M. W. Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834). The perceptual effect of this transformation—from the size of a computer screen to the grandeur of history paintings—is that the picture seems to fragment and explode before our eyes, trailing off into a seemingly infinite progression of tonal shifts from pixel to pixel and in every direction. The disquieting result is that the iconic image of the attack on the World Trade Center towers seared in everyone's memory becomes ungraspable and almost aqueous in its fugitive, slippery quality.

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954) San Zaccaria, Venice, 1995 Chromogenic print Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1996 (1996.297)

In the center of Struth's photograph is Giovanni Bellini's luminous San Zaccaria altarpiece (1505), which reigns over the adjacent paintings and all the surrounding space. The Madonna and Child and saints share an attitude of deeply spiritual communion and radiate a field of calm beyond the airy apse in which they are ensconced. Through his mastery of light and perspective, Bellini created the illusion that the space exists just beyond the wall, while Struth used photography's trompe l'oeil effect to bring the marble niche forward, as if to float on the very surface of the photograph. Two tourist pilgrims enraptured by the painting demonstrate its scale; others seated in the pews, also quiet and meditative, mark off the receding perspective. Everything in the photograph seems to exist in the same sensuous, orderly world—as if Bellini's and Struth's monumental images of sacred spaces washed in translucent Venetian light were actually of the same moment. Wall Labels

Andreas Gursky (German, born 1955) Schiphol, 199 A Chromogenic print Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1995 (1995.191)

Born in Leipzig, Andreas Gursky was educated in the heart of West Germany, first in Essen and then in Düsseldorf, where he became a "master student" of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie. Becher and his wife, Hilla, professed and practiced a straightforward style of photography that catalogues, with clarity and dispassion, the unselfconscious structures typical of a culture. Gursky began by mixing these structural approaches with the traditions of northern landscape painting. Initially he made easel-size photographs of vast, softly hued landscapes in which tiny figures played. In the 1990s he expanded the scale of his pictures to wall size and the scope of his subjects to include cityscapes and interiors shaped by industrial, electronic, and other automated functions of modern life.

In Schiphol the artist frames the tall clouds, low horizon, and perfect geometries of a runway in the windows of Amsterdam's airport. Deftly laminating the luminous skies of Baroque Low Country painting, the Romantic theme of the windowed view, and the abstraction of De Stijl, Gursky gives us a landscape layered with nostalgia, structured by modernism, and sealed behind glass—an expansive yet neatly delimited vista for human transport.

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007; born 1934) Water Towers, 1967-80; printed 1980 Gelatin silver prints Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1980 (1980.1074a-p)

As both artists and professors at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, the husband-and-wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher influenced an entire generation of German photographers, including Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky, with their typological approach to the medium in which a single archetypal subject is described through an accumulation of diverse examples. For more than three decades they have systematically examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers' houses, all recorded against a blank sky and without expressive effects. As it developed in the 1960s, the Bechers' project chimed with Conceptual Art in its emphasis on impersonal series as well as with older traditions of objective photography as practiced by such artists as August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt.

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September 20, 2007 news release The Metropolitan Museum of Art Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel 212-570-3951 fax 212-472-2764 r T j- L n i email [email protected] For Immediate Release ° Contact: Elyse Topalian Rebecca Herman

Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Inaugural Installation

Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan September 25, 2007 - March 23, 2008

Exhibition Highlights Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 1

Uta Barth (American, born Federal Republic of Germany, 1958) Untitled (98.2), 1998 Chromogenic prints Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007, born 1934) Water Towers, 1967-1980, printed 1980 Gelatin silver prints Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1980 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 2

Trisha Donnelly (American, born 1974) Satin Operator (11), 2007 Chromogenic print 158.8x111.8 cm (62 1/2x44 in.) Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2007 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 3

Adam Fuss (English, born 1961) Now!, 1988 Gelatin silver print 169.5 x 129.5 cm (66 3/4 x 51 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991

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Rodney Graham (Canadian, born 1949) Welsh Oaks #1,1998 Chromogenic print Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 4

Andreas Gursky (German, born 1955) Schiphol, 199 A Chromogenic print Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1995

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Douglas Huebler (American, 1924-1997) Duration Piece #11, Bradford, Massachusetts, 1969 Gelatin silver prints and signed typescript Purchase, Anonymous Foundation, Marian and James H. Cohen, in memory of their son Michael Harrison Cohen, Saundra B. Lane and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2004 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 5

Sharon Lockhart (American, born 1964) Untitled, 1996 Chromogenic print Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2004

Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Splitting, 197 A Chromogenic prints Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 6

Dennis Oppenheim (American, born 1938) Annual Rings, 1969 Mixed media Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999

Richard Prince (American, born 1949) Untitled (Cowboy), 1989 Chromogenic print 127 x 177.8 cm (50 x 70 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 7

Sigmar Polke (German, born 1941) Untitled, 1975 Gelatin silver print Purchase, David T. Schiff, Lila Acheson Wallace, Harriette and Noel Levine, and Nancy and Edwin Marks Gifts, 1992

Charles Ray (American, born 1953) Untitled, 1973, printed 1989 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Robert Shapazian Gift, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 1995 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 8

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) Untitled #87, 1981 Chromogenic print Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, 1995

Thomas Ruff (German, born 1958) Jpeg ny02, 2004 Chromogenic print Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift; Marlene Nathan Meyerson Gift, in memory of Andrew H. Golkin; Pamela and Arthur Sanders and The Robert A. and Renée E. Belfer Family Foundation Gifts; Neil CS. Hirsch Gift; and Marian and James H. Cohen Gift, in memory of their son, Michael Harrison Cohen, 2006 Depth of Field Exhibition Highlights Page 9

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Thomas Struth (German, born 1954) San Zaccaria, Venice, 1995 Chromogenic print Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1996

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Still Life, New York, 2001 Chromogenic print Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift, 2002

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September 18, 2007 neWS Tei ed Se The Metropolitan Museum of Art Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel 212-570-3951 fax 212-472-2764 For Immediate Release email [email protected]

Contact: Elyse Topalian Rebecca Herman

New Gallery for Modern and Contemporary Photography Opens at Metropolitan Museum September 25 Inaugural Installation: Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan

Opening: September 25, 2007 Press Preview: Monday, September 24, 10:00 a.m. - noon

The Metropolitan Museum will inaugurate the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography on September 25, 2007, establishing for the first time a gallery dedicated exclusively to photography created since 1960. With high ceilings, clean detailing, and approximately 2,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Menschel Hall is designed specifically to accommodate the large-scale photographs that are an increasingly important part of contemporary art and the Museum's permanent collection. Photographers represented in the collection include such modern masters as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Doug Aitken, and Sigmar Polke.

Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan, commented: "The establishment of this new gallery for modern photography is but the latest example of Museum Trustee Joyce Menschel's dedication to the Metropolitan and of the great generosity with which she and Robert Menschel have enriched the collections and programs of the Department of Photographs and the Museum as a whole over more than two decades. It is fair to say that without Joyce's leadership as a Trustee and as Chair of the department's Visiting Committee, photography at the Metropolitan would not play the prominent role that it does."

(more) Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Page 2

"The opening of the Menschel Hall is a long-anticipated turning point in our history and should be a revelation for visitors to the Museum: that we have been seriously and thoughtfully collecting contemporary photographs — the kinds of pictures not usually associated with the Met — for many years, especially in the last decade," remarked Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. "This most recent chapter in the history of photography can now take its place in the broad pantheon of art displayed at the Metropolitan."

The inaugural installation, entitled Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan, draws from the Museum's collection to trace the varied paths of photography since 1960: its role in conceptual art, earth art, and performance art, as seen in works by Dennis Oppenheim, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gordon Matta- Clark, and Douglas Huebler; the "Dusseldorf School," featuring works by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky; the "Pictures Generation," including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince; and other important contemporary artists who use photography, such as Adam Fuss, Rodney Graham, and Charles Ray. Depth of Field will be on view in the Menschel Hall from September 25, 2007, through March 23, 2008.

"The inaugural installation will survey some of the key photographs we have acquired over the last 20 years, as well as works that we could not exhibit until now because we did not have a proper space," said Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs and its specialist in contemporary photography. "Under the leadership of Maria Morris Hambourg, the department acquired stunning masterworks by artists such as Sigmar Polke, Cindy Sherman, and Thomas Struth. Beginning in the late 1990s, Maria and I drew up a ten-year plan for acquisitions of photography since 1960, and since then we have brought in key individual photographs and groups of work by Robert Smithson, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams, and Sharon Lockhart, among others. During the last seven years, we have built up a

(more) Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Page 3 following — especially among artists — with our rotating installations outside the modern art wing, but many photographs are simply too large to fit there. Now we can really show what we have been collecting," concluded Mr. Eklund.

The opening of the Menschel Hall builds on recent exhibitions at the Met that have brought cutting-edge contemporary photography to the attention of the Museum's broad audience. One particularly notable milestone was the Met's 2003 presentation of a major Thomas Struth retrospective. Another landmark was the recent exhibition Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan, which showcased eight moving-image works acquired by the Department of Photographs over the past five years.

Exhibitions in the Menschel Hall will change every six months, and future installations will include thematic selections on topics such as landscape and the built environment, the body, and photography about photography, as well as artists' projects, and video and new media.

The Menschel Hall brings continuity to the Department of Photographs' several galleries and its wide range of exhibitions. The new exhibition space is located adjacent to the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery, which highlights the earlier history of photography through works from the permanent collection; directly across from the Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, where special exhibitions are often presented; and in close proximity to The Howard Gilman Gallery, the site of smaller thematic exhibitions. The wide spectrum of photographs from the collection that will be seen in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall and the Museum's other galleries for photography will bring to life the entire history of the medium, from its earliest beginnings to the present day.

In conjunction with the inaugural installation in the Menschel Hall, a Sunday at the Met program on January 27 will present screenings of the films Nö by Sharon Lockhart (2003) and The Music of Regret by Laurie Simmons (2006). Each film

(more) Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Page 4 will be followed by a discussion with the artist moderated by Doug Eklund. Additional education programs include a program for teachers on Saturday, December 1 and gallery talks by Doug Eklund on October 4 (FM assistive listening devices available), November 2, November 9, November 28, December 5, and December 11 at 11 a.m. The exhibition will also be featured on the Museum's Web site at www.metmuseum.org.

The design of the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography and the exhibition design for Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan are by Michael Langley, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Emil Micha, Senior Graphic Design Manager; and lighting is by Richard Lichte and Clint Coller, Senior Lighting Designers, all of the Museum's Design Department.

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September 24, 2007

VISITOR INFORMATION

Hours Fridays and Saturdays 9:30 a.m.-9:00 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Met Holiday Mondays in the Main Building: September 3. October 8. December 24. December 31. 2007 Sponsored by Bloomberg 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. All other Mondays closed; Jan. 1, Thanksgiving, and Dec. 25 closed

Recommended Admission (Includes Main Building and The Cloisters on the Same Day) Adults $20.00, seniors (65 and over) $15.00, students $10.00 Members and children under 12 accompanied by adult free Advance tickets available at www.TicketWeb.com or 1-800-965-4827. For More Information (212) 535-7710; www.metmuseum.org

No extra charge for any exhibition. neWS reledSe The Metropolitan Museum of Art Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198

„ _ n . tel 212-570-3951 fax 212-472-2764 ror Immediate Release email [email protected] Contact: Elyse Topalian Rebecca Herman

Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Inaugural Installation

Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan September 25, 2007 - March 23, 2008

Checklist Checklist Page 1

Dennis Oppenheim (American, born 1938) Annual Rings, 1969 Mixed media 101.6x76.2 cm (40x30 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999

Douglas Huebler (American, 1924-1997) Duration Piece #11, Bradford, Massachusetts, 1969 Gelatin silver prints and signed typescript Image: 18.8 x 21.3 cm (7 3/8 x 8 3/8 in.) Mount: 67 x 99 cm (26 3/8 x 39 in.) Sheet: 27.8 x 21.5 cm (10 15/16 x 8 7/16 in.) Purchase, Anonymous Foundation, Marian and James H. Cohen, in memory of their son Michael Harrison Cohen, Saundra B. Lane and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2004

Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Splitting, 197 A Chromogenic prints 101.6x76.2 cm (40x30 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992

Charles Ray (American, born 1953) Untitled, 1973, printed 1989 Gelatin silver print 68.6x101.6 cm (27x40 in.) Purchase, Robert Shapazian Gift, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 1995

Trisha Donnelly (American, born 1974) Satin Operator (11), 2007 Chromogenic print 158.8x111.8 cm (62 1/2x44 in.) Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2007

Rodney Graham (Canadian, born 1949) Welsh Oaks #1, 1998 Chromogenic print 226.1 x 182.9 cm (89 x 72 in.) Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba, 1957-1996) Untitled (Sand), 1993-94 Photogravures 15.9 x 23.6 cm (6 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.) Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1995 Checklist Page 2

Uta Barth (American, born Federal Republic of Germany, 1958) Untitled (98.2), 1998 Chromogenic prints 114.3 x 297.2 cm (45 x 117 in.) overall; 114.3 x 144.8 cm (45 x 57 in.) each Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Still Life, New York, 2001 Chromogenic print 147.3 x 214 cm (58 x 84 1/4 in.) Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift, 2002

Sigmar Polke (German, born 1941) Untitled, 1975 Gelatin silver print 104.5 x 135.5 cm (41 1/8 x 53 3/8 in.) Purchase, David T. Schiff, Lila Acheson Wallace, Harriette and Noel Levine, and Nancy and Edwin Marks Gifts, 1992

Adam Fuss (English, born 1961) Now!, 1988 Gelatin silver print 169.5 x 129.5 cm (66 3/4 x 51 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991

Richard Prince (American, born 1949) Untitled (cowboy), 1989 Chromogenic print 127x177.8 cm (50x70 in.) Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) Untitled #87, 1981 Chromogenic print 59.2 x 122.5 cm (23 5/16 x 48 1/4 in.) Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, 1995

Sharon Lockhart (American, born 1964) Untitled, 1996 Chromogenic print 185.4x276.9 cm (73x109 in.) Purchase, Neuberger Berman Foundation Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2004 Checklist Page 3

Thomas Ruff (German, born 1958) Jpeg ny02, 200A Chromogenic print 269 x 364 cm (105 15/16 x 143 5/16 in.) Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift; Marlene Nathan Meyerson Gift, in memory of Andrew H. Golkin; Pamela and Arthur Sanders and The Robert A. and Renée E. Belfer Family Foundation Gifts;Neil CS. Hirsch Gift; and Marian and James H. Cohen Gift, in memory of their son, Michael Harrison Cohen, 2006

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954) San Zaccaria, Venice, 1995 Chromogenic print 181.9 x 230.5 cm (71 5/8 x 90 3/4 in.) Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1996

Andreas Gursky (German, born 1955) Schiphol, 1994 Chromogenic print 185.4 x 221.3 cm (73 x 87 1/8 in.) Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1995

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007, born 1934) Water Towers, 1967-1980, printed 1980 Gelatin silver prints 257.5 x 82.0 cm (101 3/8 x 32 1/4 in.) Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1980

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September 18,2007 The Metropolitan Museum of Art EDUCATION PROGRAMS Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography

Fall 2007

INAUGURAL EXHIBITION Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan September 25, 2007-March 23, 2008 The inaugural installation draws from the Museum's permanent collection to trace the varied paths of photography since 1960: its role in conceptual art, earth art, and performance art, as seen in works by Dennis Oppenheim, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Douglas Huebler; the "Dusseldorf School," featuring works by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky; the "Pictures Generation," including Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons; and other important contemporary artists who use photography, such as Adam Fuss, Rodney Graham, and Charles Ray.

SUNDAY AT THE MET Sunday, January 27 The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium In conjunction with the opening of the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Douglas Eklund, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, moderates discussion with artists Sharon Lockhart and Laurie Simmons, who have works in the Museum's collection. Two fdms by these artists serve as the afternoon's focal point to explore contemporary photography and filmmaking.

Films/Discussions Nö (2003) by Sharon Lockhart (33 min.). Followed by discussion with the artist. 2:00 The Music of Regret (2006) by Laurie Simmons (40 min.). Followed by discussion with the artist. 3:00

Programs are free with Museum admission contribution unless otherwise noted. GALLERY TALKS

Meet at the Tours sign at the south end of the Great Hall. All talks given by Douglas Eklund. Thursday, October 4, 10:00 (FM assistive listening devices available) Friday, November 2, 11:00 Friday, November 9, 11:00 Wednesday, November 28, 11:00 Wednesday, December 5, 11:00 Tuesday, December 11, 11:00

PROGRAM FOR TEACHERS Impressed by Light: Photographs in the Met Photographs can record what the eye sees, but even in its early history artists have shaped the medium to reflect ideas. Through the blending of science and art, experimentation and manipulation, photographs invite us to question the boundaries between reality and invention, as well as aesthetic vision and conception. This workshop, led by Museum curators as well as a Museum educator, first discusses the early history of photographs in the exhibition Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, followed by close examination of materials in the Art Study Room. In the afternoon, participants view works created in the last forty-five years in the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography and discuss possible curriculum connections. For information and an application, please call (212) 570-3985 or email [email protected]. Instructors: Malcolm Daniel, Douglas Eklund, and John Welch Saturday, December 1, 10:00^1:00, $80

COMMUNITY AND WORKPLACE PROGRAMS We would be pleased to send a Museum lecturer to your library, college, community center, or workplace to present a slide-illustrated talk about this exhibition. And as of November 2007, with the opening of the new Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, exhibition-related lectures, art workshops, and tours, can also be scheduled to take place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lecturers will visit sites within the five boroughs of New York City as well as those up to fifty miles from the Museum. Groups may return for follow-up tours in the Museum or may receive family passes to visit the exhibition on their own. Sign Language interpreters and Spanish-speaking lecturers are available. A fee is charged. Call (212) 396-5170.

SERVICES FOR VISITORS WITH DISABILITIES The Museum is committed to serving all audiences. Please call us about services, including Sign Language-interpreted programs, Verbal Imaging Tours, the Touch Collection, and other programs. Voice: (212) 879-5500, ext. 3561; TTY: (212) 570-3828

NOLEN LIBRARY IN THE URIS CENTER FOR EDUCATION The Nolen Library has information about the Museum's collection, special exhibitions, and a circulating teacher resource collection for educators. For further information please call (212) 570-3788.

WEBSITE For further information about our programs, visit the Museum's website at www.metmuseum.org.