'Focus on Photography' exhibitions open Oct. 11

University Museums is holding two exhibitions of photography, Focus on Photography, from Oct. 12-Dec. 9, in the Main Gallery of Old College. “Shadow of Light.” featuring works by the renowned British photographer, Bill Brandt (1904-83), and “Recent Gifts of Photography to University Museums” will be on display.

A preview reception, free and open to the public, will be held from 5-7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 11, featuring a gallery talk by internationally known documentary photographer Larry Fink from 5:15-5:45 p.m.

Fink, whose work is included in “Recent Gifts of Photography to University Museums,” has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Musée de la Photographie in Belgium. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker, and he is the author of Boxing, Runway and Social Graces.

According to Judith Cizek, curator of exhibitions at UD, the Brandt exhibition presents an overview of his work and “examines all aspects of his career--from the early work in Paris and the social documentaries of 1930s to the technically innovative portraits, landscapes and female nudes of his later years.”

The exhibition includes 67 photographs dating from 1929-79 and “underscores the ways in which Brandt redefined the possibilities of the medium as both social document and art form,” Cizek wrote, calling him “one of the most innovative photographers in the history of 20th-century photography.”
Untitled (Man in Suit, Woman in Fur Coat), by Leon Levinstein (1913-1988), ca. 1954 (1980), 20 x 26 in., gift of Mark Greenberg and Tami Morachnick, 2006
“Recent Gifts of Photography to University Museums” highlights gifts given to UD in 2006 by photography collectors, Tami Morachnick and Mark Greenberg and from William I. Homer, H. R. Sharp Professor Emeritus of Art History, and his wife Christine.

The 24 photographs given by Morachnick and Greenberg include works by the late Czechoslovakian photographer Josef Sudek; 17 photographs by the late New York street photographer Leon Levinstein; and three works by Fink.

The Homer gift includes 17 works by artists associated with the Photo-Secession and the Stieglitz Circle and also photographs by Ansel Adams, Thomas Eakins and Dr. Charles Mitchell.

Source:
http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/oct/photos100507.html