Making a Photograph

The Center for Creative Photography houses many masterpieces, such as Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30 and Ansel Adams’s Moonrise over Hernandez. Seen from a historical distance, these landmarks appear in splendid isolation. Yet this perspective neglects the lived experience—the artist’s, the subject’s, the viewer’s—that is essential to photography. Each individual photograph is part of a process, the result of experimentation, persistence, research, accident, and luck. Making a Photograph presents evidence of this process—negatives, field notes, contact sheets, source material—casting iconic images in a new light and expanding our sense of photography’s expressive potential.

The exhibition’s title comes from Ansel Adams, who used it in 1935 for the first of many books outlining his conviction that a photograph is crafted and designed by an artist rather than simply taken or recorded by a machine. Making a Photograph is not a chronological history of photography but instead an examination of photographic creativity. Organized in seven sections identifying different arenas where decisions are made and meanings are determined, the exhibition includes works by Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Frank Gohlke, Robert Heinecken, Mark Klett and Byron Wolf, Wright Morris, Hans Namuth, Jim Pomeroy, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Rosalind Solomon, Frederick Sommer, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, and others, as well as materials from the landmark exhibition The Family of Man and from three of the first commercial galleries dedicated to photography: Limelight, the Witkin Gallery, and LIGHT, all in New York.

Making a Photograph: Iconic Images and Their Origins

mit Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Frank Gohlke, Robert Heinecken, Mark Klett and Byron Wolf, Wright Morris, Hans Namuth, Jim Pomeroy, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Rosalind Solomon, Frederick Sommer, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand ...