Exhibition Dates: May 7 – August 25, 2002
Exhibition Location: The Howard Gilman Gallery, Second Floor
The photographer's ability to transform a critical moment in time into a work of art — whether an event of historical importance or a moment of ephemeral beauty — is the subject of As It Happened: Photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 7 through August 25, 2002. Fifty superb works, ranging from a parade on the Pont Royal in Paris in 1844 to an atomic bomb test in the Pacific in 1946, bear witness to a century of events large and small.
Photography's capacity to create a vivid and indelible picture of history was recognized early on. French critic Ernest Lacan noted presciently in 1856 that photography "records in turn the memorable events of our collective life on its magic slate, and each day it enriches the archives of history with some precious document." His comments were prompted by Édouard Baldus's "painfully eloquent" photographic reportage of the Rhône River floods – an exquisite panoramic example of which is included in As It Happened.
Exploration and achievement were also written on that magic slate and are represented in the exhibition: Auguste-Rosalie Bisson and his party climbed Mont Blanc in 1864, lugging an enormous box camera, glass plate negatives, and bottles of photographic chemicals to document their ascent and the view from the summit; less triumphantly but more poignantly, Robert Peary recorded himself, his ship, and the icy northern landscape 30 years later during a failed attempt to reach the North Pole. William Mayfield caught Orville Wright at the controls of a Wright Model E in 1913, and Mieczyslaw Berman made a modernist collage in 1927 celebrating Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic crossing.
Photographs in the exhibition also evoke moments of struggle, tragedy, and war that have shaped our world. One image shows the Lincoln funeral train along the curved tracks of the Philadelphia train station as it bore the fallen president home to Illinois, while another, by Alexander Gardner, shows the Lincoln assassination conspirators under guard at the gallows, moments before their execution. Only in the 20th century, with hand-held cameras and fast exposures, could photographers truly work in the midst of battle, and Robert Capa's Falling Loyalist Soldier (1936) is the iconic image of a soldier's sacrifice. Other photographs in the exhibition capture Hitler leaving the Landsberg Prison in 1924, Mussolini giving orders to the commander of the Fascist militia in 1931, and De Gaulle triumphantly re-entering a liberated Paris in 1944.
As It Happened also celebrates modern man's pastimes and flights of fancy. The camera goes fox hunting in Italy and does the foxtrot in Russia, watches Nijinsky leap and accompanies Picasso to a costume ball. It makes palpable the 20th century's passion for speed in Jacques-Henri Lartigue's The Grand Prix of the A.C.F., and in such photographs as Anton Bragaglia's Change of Position or Harold Edgerton's Drop of Milk, photography makes visible that which the eye itself cannot perceive.
As It Happened is an engaging display of photography's role in our collective understanding of the past. More than mere aide-mémoires, the works of art on view transport us to places and times that we otherwise could not know, making visible our past as it happened, and eternalizing instants that lie beneath the surface of recollection.
As It Happened is organized by Malcolm Daniel, Associate Curator and Administrator, and Lisa Hostetler, Research Associate, both of the Museum's Department of Photographs, with Pierre Apraxine, Curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection.
Mr. Daniel and Ms. Hostetler will lead gallery talks of the exhibition on Friday, May 24 and Friday June 14 at 3:00 p.m.; Wednesday, July 3 at 11 a.m.; Friday, July 12 and Friday, July 26 at 3:00 p.m.; and Friday, August 16 at 11:00 a.m.
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