In 1940, Josef Sudek began his best-known series of photographs, a body of images of or through his studio window in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Read More

Photographs of and through windows have remained popular throughout the history of photography. In the early years, the presence of windows was driven by necessity: photography in its infancy required great amounts of light, and windows obliged. Read More

Photography has often been employed in the service of recording exceptional spaces, but a photograph always more or less distorts the space it is supposed to record. The distortion may enhance the true nature of the interior or it may severely misrepresent it. Read More

None of the following photographs were taken by photographers in their own homes. Rather, to make each of the images discussed here, a photographer had to gain permission to cross the threshold into someone else’s home. If that transaction calls to mind mythic negotiations that, supposedly, allow a vampire to enter one’s home (May I… Read More

Many of us can name a work of art, music, or literature that provokes an emotional or even a physical reaction. This photograph by Guy Mendes has that quality, and can inspire an incredible sense of lightness and peace. The photograph is beautiful in its simplicity. The soft bend in the wrinkled sail allows us… Read More

All photographs depend on different combinations of chemicals and minerals to turn light into pictures. This week, as NOMA focuses on the materials and processes that artists use to create, we’d like to give some special attention to a unique and beautiful variety of photograph: the platinum print. It may come as no surprise that… Read More

As NOMA explores the theme of process and materials, this essay looks back at an exhibition from 2011, What is a Photograph?, and some of the treasures that it included from the museum’s collection. What is a photograph? How do we define its history? Over the past 190 years, photography has infiltrated almost every aspect… Read More

During the Civil War, Timothy O’Sullivan made a name for himself photographing army camp life and Eastern landscapes destroyed by cataclysmic battles. In 1871 O’Sullivan enlisted in the U.S. Corps of Engineers for a series of expeditions to map the lands west of the 100th meridian, commonly referred to as the Wheeler Survey (after leader… Read More

During a week when NOMA’s team looks toward our permanent collection for examples of plant life and floral beauty, it may seem strange to focus on the humble cabbage. Carlotta Corpron’s Nature Dancer, however, elevates leaves of Chinese cabbage out of the kitchen and into our imaginations. The sense of motion is incredible, and at… Read More

In the late 1970s, Richard Misrach produced a group of photographs in Louisiana that made dramatic use of long exposures and stroboscopic lighting. Here, the intermittent blasts of light on the row of cypress trees obliterate the detail of the trunks and transform a set of rough, textured surfaces into a group of smooth vertical… Read More

Although Imogen Cunningham’s earliest photographs were soft-focused, often ethereal studies of friends presented as allegories, she would become best known for images such as this one, which presented forms in nature or the human body as richly descriptive statements of fact. Trained as a chemist at the University of Washington, Cunningham also went on to… Read More

The rose trémière, or hollyhock, is a classic summer bloom with flowers arranged vertically on long stems. Eugéne Atget came across this hollyhock in a Paris, where he roamed the streets with his view camera every morning. Beginning about 1890, Atget made “documents pour artistes”: straightforward photographs of buildings, parks, flowers, and sculptures that he… Read More

This unique photograph, made without using a camera, has a wonderful story behind its creation, much of which is written directly on the surface of the photograph. The word “photograph” encompasses a wide variety of processes, practices, materials, and objects. Today, it is used to describe images on paper, glass, or metal, as well as… Read More

The story behind the making of this photograph is a lesson in how photographers craft stories into pictures. Lewis Hine, who was well known for this ability once said, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” Some great photographs are the product of circumstance: the right… Read More

In this photograph, Arthur Siegel captures the visual power of people united by a common cause. At different times in his career, Arthur Siegel worked as a photojournalist and documentarian, and as an artist who explored various methods of photographic abstraction. This image seems to combine these disparate approaches, documenting a demonstration even as it… Read More