Photography from North Carolina Collections at the Nasher Museum

Duke University's Nasher Museum will host the show Light Sensitive: Photographic Works from North Carolina Collections, opening February 14th and up through May 12th, 2013. 

The Nasher Museum is located on the Duke University campus in Durham, NC, at 2001 Campus Drive, at the intersection of Duke University Road and Anderson Street, adjacent to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens.

This show will include over 100 photographs chosen from private and public collections assembled by North Carolina collectors, as the folks at the Nasher say, "assembled through the dedication and vision unique to each individual collector."

The show will include a full range of image-making technologies, from small early daguerreotypes to large-scale contemporary color prints.

It will include among its offerings works by Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gefeller, Emmet Gowin (see image above), André Kertész, Clarence John Laughlin, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Vik Muniz, Laurie Simmons, Aaron Siskind, and Jerry Uelsmann.

North Carolina artists in the show include Alex Harris, William Noland, Tom Rankin, Margaret Sartor, MJ Sharpe, and Burk Uzzle.

Curated by Patricia Leighten, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke, and Sarah Schroth, Nancy Hanks Senior Curator at the Nasher Museum, the show will be organized around five themes: Light Magic; Intensified Vision; Metamorphosis; Emulations; and Constructed Identities.

The folks at the Nasher say this organizational scheme will focus our attention on "ways these artists wield the camera for social and aesthetic purposes, employing their sophisticated arsenal of tools and techniques to move us and to invite us to see something new."

We are also promised that the show will "challenge the long-standing myth that the camera is an “innocent eye” that records the world as if through an open window.

"It illustrates how artists can take ordinary features of a photograph–light and dark, shape and form, depth and space, size and scale, soft and sharp focus–and transform them to create images that engage us and change the way we see.

"Works in this exhibition reveal the great variety of ways photographers have used these techniques to persuade us of their vision."
 

This show will open with a reception on Wednesday, February 13th, from 7:30 pm. 

In connection with this show, on Thursday, February 28th, at 7:00 pm at the Nasher, the annual Semans Lecture on Art will be delivered by Burk Uzzle, a photographer and past president of Magnum Photo, whose work is featured in Light Sensitive and in the Nasher Museum's permanent collection. 

This show, together with the show of Alec Soth's work  at the NC Museum of Art, means that lots of exceptional photography will be on offer in North Carolina's Research Triangle area this winter.