Selected Images

Click on an image below to learn more.

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  Self-Portrait in Mirrors, Paris
  Self-Portrait in Mirrors, Paris

  Ilse Bing (born Germany, 1899–1998), Self-Portrait in Mirrors, Paris, 1931, printed ca. 1941, gelatin silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation, 1987.143

  Bing’s photographs document the early twentieth-century “new woman,” a type who was no longer confined to the domestic sphere typical of past generations but engaged freely in the changing urban landscapes in Europe and the United States.

  In this multifaceted self-portrait, Bing plays with the concept of fragmented identity through her multiple reflections. The sharp focus on her mirrored profile draws attention away from her forward-pointing lens, allowing the viewer to feel like a subject as well as a spectator.

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  Lightening Fields 182
  Lightening Fields 182

  Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948), Lightening Fields 182, 2009, gelatin silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of the Third Annual Collectors Evening, 2012, 2012.3

  In a series of experiments, Hiroshi Sugimoto applied charges of electricity directly to unexposed film to create images without the use of camera or lens. His process embodies the medium of photography at its most elemental: Exposing a photo-sensitive material to light, creating an image that is chemically fixed from fading.

  The resulting photograph is rich in tonality, its electric shapes abstract while also resembling the basic structures on which natural forms are built. Here, the trace of an electric charge sweeps across the composition, reading in turns like the textures of a human hand, the upward-reaching tentacles of a fern, and the stark branches of a tree.

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  Phoenix Park on a Sunday, Dublin, 1966
  Phoenix Park on a Sunday, Dublin, 1966

  Evelyn Hofer (American, 1922–2009), Phoenix Park on a Sunday, Dublin, 1966, dye transfer print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser in honor of Brett Abbott,  2016.442

  Evelyn Hofer began her five-decade career as a photographer in the New York magazine world of the 1940s producing fashion spreads for Harper’s Bazaar. Her commercial experience with color photography made her an early innovator when she shifted her focus to fine art and editorial photography in the 1960s. Hofer used color in expressive ways to direct her viewers’ attention. She framed this portrait of a group of soccer players so that their vibrant jerseys set them apart from the subdued tones of the Dublin park where Hofer encountered them.

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  Sunday Funnies
  Sunday Funnies

  Sally Mann (American, born 1951), Sunday Funnies, 1991, printed 1995, gelatin silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1995.179

  From 1985 to 1994, Sally Mann photographed the coming of age of her three children: Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia. One of the first photographers to explore in depth the psyche and drama of adolescence, Mann’s series Immediate Family is an intimate portrait of childhood through the tender eye of a mother. Although the children often directly confront the camera in the series, Sunday Funnies depicts a quiet scene when the children may not even realize their private moment is being lovingly captured.

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  Dust Breeding
  Dust Breeding

  Man Ray (American, 1890–1976), Dust Breeding, 1920, gelatin silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation, 1984.223

  A fixture of Surrealist and Dadaist circles in Paris, Man Ray was a close friend and collaborator of fellow artist Marcel Duchamp. At his friend’s request, Man Ray photographed Duchamp’s sculpture The Large Glass after it had collected a year’s worth of dust in storage while Duchamp was in New York. Taken from an elevated perspective and with part of the sculpture cropped out, the photograph transcends mere documentation by disorienting any sense of scale. The modestly sized artwork is transformed into an expansive otherworldly landscape.

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  View Down the Valley, Yosemite
  View Down the Valley, Yosemite

  Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916), View Down the Valley, Yosemite, 1865–1866, albumen silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Life Insurance Company of Georgia, 1980.119

  Carleton Watkins was one of the most highly acclaimed photographers to survey the American West in the 1860s. This sweeping view of the Yosemite Valley conveys the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Western landscape that drew so many travelers and entrepreneurs.
  Watkins anchored the composition by flanking the tree-lined valley floor with the iconic landmarks of Cathedral Rocks and El Capitan rising on either side. In the foreground, the glassy Merced River conveys the stillness of a seemingly untouched wilderness.

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  Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana
  Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana

  Richard Misrach (American, born 1949), Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998, printed 2012, pigmented inkjet print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund, 2012.7

  (c) Richard Misrach 1998. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, Pace-MacGill Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Arts

  Richard Misrach, renowned for his contemporary landscapes of the American West, received a commission from the High Museum for its Picturing the South initiative in 1998. He chose to photograph the highly industrialized section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley.

  Misrach described Cancer Alley as a “remarkable corridor of historic, cultural, and natural resources, which in the past decades has been virtually decimated by the introduction of the petro-chemical industry. Alongside restored and potentially restorable classic antebellum plantations sit over 136 behemoth industrial sites—a bizarre juxtaposition of the charming and the horrific.”

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  Blacktail Lake WY 7
  Blacktail Lake WY 7

  Matthew Brandt (American, born 1982), Blacktail Lake WY 7, 2013, dye coupler print soaked in Blacktail Lake water. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Stephen Wells and Will Hackman, 2017.344

  Matthew Brandt’s experimental approach to image making reconfigures the basic physical elements of photographic objects. In his Lakes and Reservoirs series, Brandt photographed bodies of water throughout the American West and then soaked the prints for several weeks in water he had collected from those locations.

  The lake water broke down each image, causing the color dyes to dissolve and mix together and the emulsion to bubble and crack, abstracting what was once a straightforward description of a majestic vista. The resulting image is literally embedded with the residue of what it represents and, in a sense, was created in collaboration with the landscape itself.

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  Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983
  Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983

  Nan Goldin (American, born 1953), Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983, 1983, dye destruction print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 2005.337.6

  (c) Nan Goldin

  This photograph is part of Nan Goldin’s Cookie portfolio, which documents the artist’s familial-like friendship with Cookie Mueller, who died of AIDS in 1989. Goldin was among a generation of photographers who, instead of looking to the outside world for inspiration, focused on the deep personal and social bonds in their communities. Goldin described her process as “a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on—I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.”

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  Simi Valley
  Simi Valley

  Alex Prager (American, born 1979), Simi Valley, 2014, pigmented inkjet print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of the Fifth Annual Collectors Evening, 2015, 2015.2