Press Materials

Photographers often record change through images in series, registering transformations in the world around them. Artists featured in the exhibition photographed faces and places over minutes, months, or years. Historical and contemporary photographs prompt reflection on the ways the passage of time impacts how we see people and spaces. Curated by Mazie Harris.

Once a simple wooden box with a primitive lens and cap for controlling light, the modern camera has undergone enormous change since its invention in the early nineteenth-century. Flexible film stocks, built-in light meters, motor drives, and megapixels are a few of the advancements that have transformed the way this ingenious device captures and preserves a moment in time. This display explores the evolution of the camera through the Museum’s collection of historic cameras and photographs. Curated by Paul Martineau.

On assignment to document poverty in Brazil for Life magazine, American photographer Gordon Parks encountered one of the most important subjects of his career: Flávio da Silva. Parks featured the resourceful, ailing boy from an impoverished Rio favela (Portuguese for shantytown) and his family in the heart-rending 1961 photo essay “Freedom’s Fearful Foe.” It resulted in donations from Life readers but sparked controversy in Brazil. This exhibition explores the celebrated photo essay, tracing the extraordinary chain of events it triggered and Parks’ representation of Flávio over several decades. Curated by Amanda Maddox.  

Long associated with aristocratic portraiture, pastel had fallen out of fashion by the mid-nineteenth-century, when Jean-François Millet (1814 – 1875) turned the powdery medium to a quite different purpose: scenes of contemporary peasant life. This installation presents a selection of pastels by Millet and his followers, addressing the relationship between rural labor and urban collecting and encouraging visitors to consider how an artist’s chosen medium affects our understanding of his or her subject matter. Curated by Emily Beeny.

With works drawn from local museums, a private collection, and the Getty’s own collection, True Grit provides two vibrant surveys: one of early twentieth-century American printmaking and the other a complementary photography rotation. Compelling depictions of the time convey a broad view of American culture that include dance halls and boxing rings, skyscrapers and subways, parks and tenement apartments. Using innovative techniques, these American artists captured the gritty world around them and came to terms with modern life. It is curated by Stephanie Schrader, curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, James Glisson, interim Virginia Steele Scott, Chief Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum.