Writing in an early issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly magazine Camera Work, a polemical journal dedicated to “the furtherance of modern photography,” he urged his readers to stop trying to make camera pictures that mimic paintings. Sadakichi Hartmann, the German Japanese writer who was photography’s first great independent critic, threw down the gauntlet in 1904.
But LACMA’s “XYZ” show offers an excellent opportunity to experience a pivotal transformation in art.įor most of the 20th century, straight photography was the genre of camera work chosen by photographers with sincere aspirations to making art. The Getty currently has a thumbnail overview - 24 images - of the artist’s career, drawn from the two museums’ joint-acquisition last year of his entire photographic output.
GAY SEX ART GALLERY FULL
Paul Getty Museum, LACMA is organizing a full Mapplethorpe retrospective for 2016. Lunn Jr., who had been a CIA agent before opening an art gallery in Washington, D.C.) The X, Y, Z Portfolios, rarely shown in their entirety, are on view through March 24 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That was the name given by Robert Mapplethorpe to 39 black-and-white pictures gathered in three portfolios of photographs he shot with a Hasselblad 500 camera and published between 1978 and ’81. Whatever happened to straight photography? The short answer is: X, Y and Z.
Review: LACMA’s ‘XYZ’ on Robert Mapplethorpe: Gay artist vs.