Growing up, I always loved my local photographic museum MOPA (Museum of Photographic Arts). It lead me to great exposure of many different artists and fed my love for photography early on. The cool thing about this museum is that the exhibits rotate pretty fast, so there is a lot to see throughout the year. Most commonly, however, the museum features black and white prints. This lead to a quick obsession with the darkroom and gelatin prints (featured in below article). More often than not museums as such have student-competition and volunteer opportunities which is always something (as an artist) to look into.
The latest exhibition of my hometown photography museum, one of three independent photography museums in the US, is on Aaron Siskind. The exhibition took place in person until the beginning of May, but is still available online. His work featured a variety of gelatin silver prints created in the late twentieth century. Gelatin silver prints are the most common types of prints created in the dark room with black-and-white photography. His work is an interesting interaction between abstraction and post-world war photography as further described in the exhibit.
Within the context of the class, we often debated about the presence of political messages. I think it is reassuring in artists like Aaron, that the journalistic, abstract documentation of historical information is very much alive. I like artists that captures life as it is in an interesting way, obscuring one’s inherent perception.
Link to website/ Exhibition: https://mopa.org/exhibitions/aaron-siskind-mid-century-modern/#
More of his work: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/aaron-siskind?all/all/all/all/0
More about the museum: https://mopa.org/
More about gelatin silver prints (very interesting!): https://www.nga.gov/research/online-editions/alfred-stieglitz-key-set/practices-and-processes/gelatin-silver-prints.html
