UW News

July 23, 2009

Henry Director Sylvia Wolf curates ‘Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection’

UW News

For a new exhibition of photographic portraits from its own permanent collections, the Henry Art Gallery had a nationally known photography curator right at hand — its own director, Sylvia Wolf.

Wolf knows art photography as few do, having been a photo curator for 22 years, first for the Art Institute of Chicago and then at the Whitney Museum in New York City. She came to the Henry from the Whitney in the spring of 2008.

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection comprises about 23 images, many of which are from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photo Collection, acquired by the Henry through gift and purchase in 1997. The photos range from formally posed 19th century portraits such as an image of Frederick Douglass to early 20th century portraits by Imogen Cunningham and several Polaroids by Andy Warhol from the 1970s.

It also features photographs by Patrick Faigenbaum, Marsha Burns, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Deborah Luster, Fred Miller, Nicholas Nixon and Aleksandr Rodchenko. The exhibit opened on July 2 and will run through Oct. 25 in the Henry’s North Galleries.

For Wolf, it was a pleasant challenge to choose these images from the approximately 2,000 photos — including hundreds of portraits — in the Henry’s permanent collections. She said when a photographer and a subject agree to create a portrait, “A complex dynamic is set in motion and it is affected by a number of elements … whether they know one another, what the time period is and (the subject’s) familiarity and comfort level with the camera.

“You can see it in the posture and the formal demeanor that is projected — sometimes it’s an important occasion, sometimes not. In 1845, for instance, you might have a portrait taken only once in your lifetime, whereas some of the pictures in this show that are more contemporary are casual snapshots.”

A photograph by Faigenbaum of an aristocratic Italian family, however, proves an exception to that rule. “These are very carefully staged, carefully orchestrated,” Wolf said.

She said she tried to choose images for the show “so that each photograph does something different. How do they play off one another, not just in terms of content but in scale, in framing, in attitude toward the subject?”

It’s a relatively small exhibit — about two dozen images in all. But other items in the Henry photograph collections (including the Monsen photographs) can be viewed online as part of the Henry’s Digital Interactive Gallery (DIG) Project. The project was initiated in 2007 with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and as of April, the Henry had more than 11,200 images in its online database, accessible through the gallery’s Web site, www.henryart.org.

“I’m proud of the Henry’s collections,” Wolf said. “To put objects from our holdings on view invites the creative minds in the UW and Seattle communities to discover resources we have, and what kinds of relationships can be made between works of art when you put together shows like this. That’s the beauty of collection exhibitions.”