Exposição - Femme ’n isms, Part II: Flashpoints in Photography, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, until January 18, 2025
Drawn from the Allen’s collection, this exhibition spans more than 150 years. Although far from comprehensive, the loosely chronological presentation encompasses key practitioners and decisive moments in the history of photography.
From the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th, there was widespread debate as to whether photography should be considered a fine art rather than a mechanical trade. The exhibition opens with practitioners who took advantage of this ambiguity to enter the field and make crucial discoveries, largely through portraiture. Works on view from the 1920s to the 1950s show how photographers used the unique characteristics of the medium to document the quintessentially modernist processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and scientific discovery.