Photo Revolution

Worcester Art Museum • Worcester, MA • worcesterart.org • November 16, 2019–February 16, 2020

Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman is a voluminous exhibit which argues for a new understanding of photography’s place and role in both fine art and contemporary culture by highlighting not only the depth of the photographic works themselves, but their influence and impact upon other artists and media as well. The show includes over 200 works that range from the traditionally presented high art photographs to printed paper dresses, movies and television clips, collage and found images on Polaroid. The show even includes works in other media that have been shaped by the visual expectations photography has brought.

Andy Warhol, Mao Tse-Tung, 1972, color screenprint, National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan, 1977.91. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #7 (1978) shows a woman leaning against the frame of an open sliding door, hair disheveled, a martini glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, her slip hitched up to reveal her garters and hose. In the bottom left corner, another woman is concealed by a large sun hat, an image both so iconic and familiar that one may be forgiven for thinking they have seen the film. This is one of Sherman’s many imaginary alternate existence self-portraits.

This same blurring of the line between photo as a tool for documenting and as a tool for artistic expression is explored again and again throughout the show from various vantage points. While Sherman is in the role of staging an image to appear posing as a moment captured, the works of Gary Winogrand are documentary images which manage, through their composition and perspective, to cross over into artistic expression. In Elliot Richardson, Press Conference (1973), the camera has pulled back to reveal not only the man in the suit speaking while seated at a table, but the slightly absurdist trail of cords leading to the numerous tape recording machines laid on the floor at his feet.

The conversation about photography’s dance between art and record, reaches its zenith in curator Nancy Burns’s decision to place found images, Polaroids` of unknown people in moments of their lives, beside works by Andy Warhol. The similarities and reflections between the works cause the viewer to reconsider the base nature of art and both its role, and all-pervasive presence, in our lives.