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Over her career, Catherine Opie has created a defining and powerful body of photographic work. Since the mid-1980s, Opie has been documenting the United States—its landscape and inhabitants—capturing a vast array of subjects, from freeways and football fields to the S/M community, surfers, children, and her neighbors and friends in South Central Los Angeles. Her straightforward approach to photography produces singular images that capture such complex aspects of human relations as intimacy, trust, and belief.

Elizabeth forms part of a series of portraits by Opie depicting those close to her, including other artists (Matthew Barney, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker among them). Opie has long made work involving her immediate community, and this new series marks both the continuity and expansion of her circle. Elizabeth features the choreographer and performer Elizabeth Streb, known for her experimental, athletically challenging contemporary dance. Opie has posed Streb against a black drop cloth and uses theatrical lighting to create a formally classical portrait that recalls seventeenth-century painting with allegorical dimensions. The arrangement renders certain details in extraordinarily intimate detail, as the eye is drawn to the sitter’s face, hand, necklace, and the floral motif on her shirt, which seem to emerge from utter darkness. In this series, Opie describes these creative individuals with a potency and focus that has become a defining feature of her oeuvre.

The portrait Elizabeth joins a landscape photograph by Opie in the ICA/Boston collection. Its acquisition enables the museum to represent her with salient work in both genres and to explore their connections, the very subject of the 2011 ICA exhibition Catherine Opie: Empty and Full. Furthermore, the addition of this work augments the museum’s growing strength in photography and portraiture and supports the recent acquisition of works by Rineke Dijkstra, Roe Ethridge, and Boris Mikhailov.

2016.09

During his brief ten-year career, photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist Mark Morrisroe produced an innovative and varied body of work. A participant in the punk scene in Boston in the 1970s and in the queer music and art scene in New York City in the 1980s, Morrisroe placed the performance of identity and sexuality at the center of his practice. His photographs and 8mm films, featuring the artist, his friends and lovers, and his everyday surroundings, serve as diaries of experimentation, marked by melodrama and romance, degradation, and politics. Working extensively with Polaroid, Morrisroe experimented with the photographic process, manipulating negatives, layering and hand-painting prints, and testing the limits of the photographic image’s reproducibility. Having grown up in Boston, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1977 to 1981 with an influential cohort that included David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Jack Pierson. He exhibited at Pat Hearn Gallery from 1985 until his death due to AIDS-related illnesses in 1989.

“Nymph-O-Maniac” Promo Still Spectacular Studios shows cast members of Morrisroe’s 44-minute, low-budget film Nymph-O-Maniac, which he shot with Super 8 film in the style of his idol John Waters. The photograph self-consciously captures the act of performance. The buxom female lead, Pia Howard, is posed in the hallway of her apartment where the film is largely set, conjuring celebrity shots of Marilyn Monroe. Two men beside her hold masks in their hands, and a collage of naked men—an expression of Pia’s sexualized persona—covers the right-hand third of the photograph. This “promo still”—a category that itself participates in performance—exudes a polymorphous abundance of masquerade and sex. To create the work, Morrisroe used a “sandwich” technique of his own invention, first making a color photograph, then rephotographing the picture in black and white, and finally superimposing the negatives to print the final photograph. This process results in deep shadows and a gauzy screen of scuffs, dust, and fingerprints, visually registering the bodily experimentation taking place among the subjects.

This acquisition introduces the work of an important Boston artist into the ICA/Boston collection, which includes photographs by Morrisroe’s peers Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Shellburne Thurber. It joins 1980s works by such artists as Jimmy De Sana, Ray Navarro, and Nicholas Nixon that also reflect the inventiveness and poignancy of art in the time of AIDS.

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For the past thirty years, Boston-based Abelardo Morell has pursued a photographic practice that spans intimate black-and-white prints and large color images made by converting rooms into huge camera obscuras. First gaining attention in the 1980s for small-scale portraits of ordinary objects and books made with a large-format camera, Morell is now best-known for the camera obscura pictures, disorienting images of exterior views projected inversely on interior walls. Morell’s diverse photographic practice traces an interest in the everyday, affirming a belief in its aesthetic and communicative forces.

Camera Obscura: Houses Across the Street in Our Bedroom, Quincy, Massachusetts is an early example of what has become Morell’s signature approach. By covering his bedroom windows with black cloth into which he cuts a small hole, Morell creates a camera obscura, an optical technique from ancient times that is often touted as one of the origins of photography. In the final image, the facades of two houses and foliage from trees are cast upside down on the wall above a bed and nightstand. Made the first year Morell began to experiment with the technique, this piece demonstrates the poetic overlapping of public and private, exterior and interior, that would come to distinguish much of his work.

This acquisition introduces the work of an important Boston artist to the ICA/Boston collection and builds on the museum’s holdings of work by such photographers as Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Shellburne Thurber. Morell’s work also enriches an emerging thematic strength in the collection—the home as a site of artistic production—as evidenced by recently acquired works by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Diane Simpson.

2016.10

In her films, photographs, sculptures, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt explores how photography provides access to memories of personal experience, frames understanding of the self, and shapes and preserves the collective memory of historical events. Hewitt’s distinctive visual language derives in equal measure from her instincts as an archivist—gathering and sifting through the documents—and her formal concerns, rooted in twentieth-century film theory and sculptural practice and in the longer history of still-life painting.

In Riffs on Real Time, a series of ten color photographs, Hewitt sets up a dynamic between personal iconography and widely circulated images from newspapers and magazines. She reports that she was influenced by the way her grandmother arranged family photos in albums. Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10) features a backyard snapshot of an African-American man centered on top of a page showing an image of broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite framed by the rounded edges of an old-fashioned television. A map of South America is also visible, its lines and shapes extending beyond the frame. Hewitt has arranged and photographed this construction on a wooden floor that serves as a literal ground for the composition. Here, different registers of time are staged in a visual language that speaks to the complex and simultaneous formation of both personal memory and collective history.

The series Riffs on Real Time was shown in its entirety for the first time at the ICA/Boston in 2011. The acquisition of Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10) thus marks the ICA’s exhibition history while enriching the museum’s strong collection of photography, joining works by Anne Collier and Sara VanDerBeek.

2017.25

In her work in photography, video, and performance, LaToya Ruby Frazier addresses contemporary topics such as inequality in access to healthcare and the societal and personal consequences of deindustrialization. Combining documentary modes with portraiture, she presents candid glimpses of everyday life. Over the course of the last decade, Frazier has focused on the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, whose effects she has witnessed as the tangible and psychological scars on her immediate family.

Momme Portrait Series (Floral Comforter) is from a series of portraits featuring the artist and her mother posing in the latter’s house in Braddock. These photographs capture the two women in the act of making an image of themselves within the mis-en-scène of a domestic space. The floral backdrop and plaid pajama pants in this work register Frazier’s interest in patterns, and, with the vertical elements of the figures, provide visual structure to the overall image. Through her visually sensitive attention to the individual, the family, and U.S. society, Frazier visualizes complex relationships in precisely organized compositions.

This photograph is one among several by Frazier in the ICA/Boston collection, and together they enter into dialogue with works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Roe Ethridge, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Thomas Ruff that explore identity through photographic portraiture.

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2017.29

Anthony Hernandez’s subtle yet charged photographs focus on social issues, urban dwellings, and individuals living at the margins of society. His subjects directly confront the camera’s gaze, often seeming slightly disturbed by its—or our—presence. After graduating from East Los Angeles College, Hernandez served as a medic in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and began photographing in the 1970s. While his early works depicting urban environments were shot in black and white, Hernandez later shifted to color photography in the 1980s.

Discarded #5, Near Brawley, California is part of a more recent series consisting of thirty large-scale color photographs that investigates how Americans discard what they no longer need or value, including buildings, memories, and people. Hernandez took these photographs in the east and northeast regions around Los Angeles from 2012 to 2015. Here, he captures the aftermath of a postrecession California represented by abandoned real estate, deserted valleys, and, in the case of Discarded #5, an elderly man living in a bus. “Some people ask, ‘What’s so important or compelling about taking pictures of such unpleasant subjects like city dwellers?’… My work may be beautiful or it might not be, that just isn’t what I am concerned with. I try to be open and face the city… . To me it’s not unpleasant or unbeautiful, it’s just life—which has to be threatening sometimes if it is going to be interesting,” says the artist.

This work contributes to the museum’s strong holdings of contemporary photography and portraiture, joining photographic portraits by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Nan Goldin.

2016.33

In the late 1970s, Laurie Simmons began employing photography as a means of critiquing representations of women in mass media. Simmons drew on childhood memories of her mother and representations of mothers she saw on television in the 1950s to stage imagined domestic tableaux, often with a lone female figurine in the interior of a dollhouse, which she then recorded with photography. These artworks subversively explored the concept of the ideal housewife as a fabricated construct.

Inspired by packs of dancing cigarettes seen in television commercials and magazine advertisements, Simmons began her Walking Objects series in the late 1980s. She added human legs to books, handbags, cakes, and guns, and then photographed the assemblages at human scale. Often dramatically lit against anonymous backdrops, the Walking Objects anthropomorphize the objects they picture and simultaneously point to the objectification of people, especially women, in contemporary, commodity culture. In Walking Camera (Jimmy the Camera / Gift to Jimmy from Laurie), the prop camera is worn by Simmons’s friend, the artist Jimmy DeSana, a key figure in the East Village art scene in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, who taught Simmons how to develop film. Here, it is DeSana who literally embodies the camera and likewise photography. The enlarged scale of the photographed camera, and its mobility on legs, points toward the ubiquity of photography in everyday life. The photograph also serves as a memorial to DeSana who died of HIV/AIDS-related illnesses in 1990.

This photograph adds depth to the museum’s photography collection, joining key works by Jimmy DeSana, Cindy Sherman, and Louise Lawler. Simmons’s studio-based photography is also a key precedent for artist’s in the collection, including Roe Ethridge, Leslie Hewitt, Anne Collier, and Sara VanDerBeek.

2016.21

Boris Mikhailov is one of the leading photographers of the former Soviet Union. Trained as an engineer, Mikhailov is largely self-taught in photography and his work was not widely exhibited until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Deeply rooted in the history and political climate of Eastern Europe, his work documents the experiences of daily life with poignancy, humor, and empathy. His Case History series documents those left homeless after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Other series by the artist have taken on conceptual interests, including the color red and low viewpoints, both subtle means of pointing to Soviet rule.

Mikhailov took the 129 photographs that make up Cambridge Album when he was a professor in residence at Harvard University in the fall of 2000. The photographic album documents the artist’s daily experiences—his walks through the neighborhood, meals with family and friends, trips to the beach, and intimate domestic life. Mikhailov shot many of the photographs with low viewpoints and strong angles, as if holding the camera at his hip. He further distorts his subjects by closely framing and cropping them, capturing portions of bodies or landscapes with no visible horizon. These techniques force uncomfortably close views of the bodies and scenes. Mikhailov printed each photograph in a small, approximately three-by-eight-inch format and arranged them in the album. The juxtaposition of photographs introduces its own visual rhythm, emotional tenor, and individual experience of his time living and working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This work joins two other photographs by Mikhailov in the ICA/Boston’s collection from the Case Histories series, augmenting the museum’s capacity to share the breadth of his work. In 2004, the ICA presented Mikhailov’s first retrospective in the United States. Cambridge Album joins the work of other photographers also invested in the capacity of the everyday and of portraiture to be politically and poetically potent, such as Abelardo Morell, Nan Goldin, Shelburne Thurber, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.

2016.17

See Tom Moran, Quincy, Massachusetts, July 1987 for series description.

2017.13