The Big Picture

Museum’s photography exhibition showcases masterworks of history and today

BY CHARLES RILEY

If you love photography, then you cannot afford to miss the blockbuster show at the Nassau County Museum of Art before it closes March 5. With major works on loan from top-tier collectors and galleries, it offers the whole range of the medium, from its very beginnings with painterly images of Manhattan in the 1890s by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz to the stars of today. Like the Wizard of Oz, the show starts with classic black-and-white early works and then explodes in hugescale color prints. Fans of photography love the show because the medium is accessible: anyone with a camera or smartphone has access to its creative and documentarian possibilities.

But this full-building exhibition features it at its apex, assembling the iconic works of master photographers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and tracking the technological innovations that pushed the limits of their medium.

Beginning with an homage to canonical greats, including Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Man Ray, the intimate small-scale prints (most made by the artists) display the technical and compositional savvy that put photography on a par with painting. A stunning gallery of works by Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Robert Capa (one of the eleven surviving shots from D Day, printed in 1944) many coming from the top private collections as well as the Magnum agency, remind us of the “Golden Age” of photography history unfolded in front of their cameras and the vintage prints are among the most prized in the world. Among the highlights are two versions of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, considered the Mona Lisa of photography, and one is annotated by the artist with a short, typed caption she attached to its corner. Along with the prints of Walker Evans, these are heartbreaking images of America during the Great Depression, examples of photography’s heroic role in shaping the nation’s public policies (Lange’s work pushed major federal reforms).

The exhibition bursts into massive color prints by Thomas Struth, Ahmet Ertug, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer, Gregory Crewdson, James Casebere and others who use large scale to draw the viewer into magnificent scientific and architectural spaces. A gallery featuring Bernd and Hilla Becher, the famous teachers of Candida Hofer, Struth and Ruff, offers precise portraits of industrial sites. A spectacular portrait by Lalla Essaydi explores the ways in which women are portrayed in the Muslim world. A heart-stopping installation by Christian Boltanski shares a gallery with a huge, dream-like panorama by Roslyn resident Yongliang Yang that draws upon the classical Chinese literary source, Peach Blossom Spring. Celebrating the creative life, the exhibition also takes us into the studios of celebrated artists: Constantin Brancusi in a rare self-portrait, Roy Lichtenstein at work while Laurie Lambrecht quietly shoots, riveting portraits by Ernest Haas, Bernard Gotfryd, John Jonas Gruen, Hans Namuth, luminaries including Lee Krasner, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon and others.

Nassau County Museum of Art is located at 1 Museum Dr., in Roslyn. Visit www.nassaumuseum.org for details.

—Charles Riley is the director of the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn.