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Deeply invested in the examination of the historical relationship of photography and sculpture, Sara VanDerBeek often constructs assemblages of objects and images for the express purpose of photographing them. She draws her found materials and images from a variety of sources—art-historical anthologies, her family archive of photographs, and collected ephemera—and shoots numerous rolls of film of each tableau before completing the work as a single photograph.

The artist’s methodology includes splicing and superimposing, as seen in Continuum Blue. Here VanDerBeek has constructed a diamond-shaped collage, arranging four triangles of patchwork imagery to radiate out from a point in the middle. The content of the individual images becomes color and pattern, giving way to an image of simultaneity, like a moment seized in a filmic cross-fade. Almost visualizing movement, its effect is mesmeric.

This photograph joins another by VanDerBeek in the ICA/Boston collection, building the museum’s holdings of the artist’s work. It further strengthens the ICA’s collection of studio-based photography, which includes works by Roe Ethridge, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Ruff, and Lorna Simpson.

2016.06

Eileen Quinlan’s staged and evocative photographs consider how the hand of the artist expresses itself in the photographic medium. Her work touches upon a wide range of subjects, from feminism, parenting, and aging to “screen culture” and existentialism. Early in her career, Quinlan was interested in the seductive qualities of a photograph: for example, how advertisements enticingly stage products to stimulate desire. This was part of Quinlan’s broader interest in “constructed” or, as the artist declares, “non-straight” images. Her images are not “trafficking in truth” but rather explore intervention and subjectivity through process and experimentation.

A Ground in the Air, whose title comes from a biography of the 19th century photographer Nadar, is a near-accidental composition combining multiple strategies. The artist shot a piece of canvas hanging on the wall with 4×5 Polaroid-type 55 film, and then manipulated the physical negatives to create the photograph. She etched on the negatives, stuck them together when they were wet, and then pulled them apart once dried, breaking the emulsion. The artist’s experimental process creates a palpable dynamism throughout the composition, particularly with the inscribed etches and the corners of this odd central “shape” pointing outside of the frame. The scratches and tears—both literal and visual—may echo Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in his seminal text Camera Lucida as something that grabs and affects viewers. A Ground in the Air, along with many of the artist’s other works, are more than what they appear, enticing you to consider and look closely as the work.

The ICA/Boston organized Quinlan’s first solo museum presentation in 2009, marking the museum’s early commitment to this artist. Within the museum’s strong collection of photography, this seemingly non-figurative work by Quinlan diversifies our holdings. The artist’s focus on process and composition possesses a painterly intuition, bringing this work into dialogue with photographic works by Sandro Cinto and collages by Charline von Heyl.

2017.27

Employing a diverse array of mediums, Gabriel Orozco makes works that are infused with wit and insight. Often depicting banal objects submitted to absurd gestures, from a car cut lengthwise (La D.S., 1993) to an ice-cream cone placed on top of a bush (Ice Cream House, 1995), Orozco reveals the complicated layers that make up the quotidian with a humorous, Duchampian sensibility.

Yielding Stone Image comes from Orozco’s performance project Yielding Stone, in which he made a sizeable plasticine sphere—about the weight of his own body—that he then rolled through the streets of New York. The object picked up the street’s sediment and surface activity, literalizing the imprint of the environment. In this image, the ball has been marked by the grooves of the metal grating that covers the city’s underground power and sewage systems. The artist is both palpably present and absent: the stone becomes a stand-in for Orozco’s body, and the artist’s action is the origin of its movement. As Orozco has said about his interest in spheres, “I believe the idea of movement, circulation, containers, focus, concentration, pointing, all have to do with circular firms in motion and the connecting of circles and elements like individual bodies.” Invested in process and its visibility in works of art, Orozco pushes the definition of action-based works and their documentation through his sculptural and photographic works.

Yielding Stone Image introduces the work of an artist new to the ICA/Boston collection, and expands its geographical scope. The photograph serves as an apt introduction to Orozco’s work and joins a number of other works that explore the presence or absence of the body in everyday scenarios, from Ana Mendieta’s performative bodily imprints to sculptures by Charles LeDray and Cornelia Parker.

2017.26

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.

800.16.06

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.

800.16.03

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