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Newsletter - Spring 2001
Acquisitions

Focus on Photography

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum began collecting photographs early on in its history, but it was only in the 1980s that the collection began to grow in earnest. A groundbreaking exhibition organized at the museum-Images of Italy: Photography in the Nineteenth Century-was the first of its kind in the United States and led to the gift and purchase of many more images for the teaching collection. Subsequent exhibitions of photographs, both modern and 19th century, have ensued, always accompanied by educational programming in various disciplines to extend the reach of the work. The exhibition of controversial photographs by Sally Mann in 1999 was an especially successful event. The artist's opening lecture attracted a standing-room-only audience of over 400 and thousands viewed her photographs during the run of the exhibition.

In 2001, it is difficult to imagine a museum without a serious focus on photography, both in its collecting program and in its special exhibitions. Alumnae have played a very important role in the development of the museum's holdings of photographs, with significant gifts coming from the family of Barbara Mathias ('34), Lynne Mowbray Wegner ('73), Stacey Weaver ('69), Barbara Johnson Parnass ('48), Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock ('47), and Madeleine Plonsker ('62) to mention only a few. Most recently, Deborah Bersch Gold ('84) and her husband Richard S. Gold presented the museum with a stunning portfolio of photographs by Sally Gall, a contemporary American artist whose unique landscape visions have attracted the attention of critics worldwide. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Gall has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and the Southeast Museum of Photography.

The portfolio of 13 gelatin silver prints given in 2000 by the Golds were made by Gall during the 1980s and 1990s, and range in geographical locale from Rio de Jeneiro to Mount Monadnock. When you first encounter these images, you get a sense of the limpid beauty and calm of her chosen landscapes, but this sensation is quickly intruded upon by a feeling of eerie queasiness, as if something's not entirely right. Whether you are looking at the almost suffocatingly crowded image of the Rio Botanical Garden, or the Zen-like open spaces of a New Hampshire lake, the atmosphere is suffused with a vertiginous, dreamlike quality. It is Gall's darkroom manipulations that produce this unusual sensation of surface and light that is at once disturbing and romantic, depending upon the viewer's point of view.

A major purchase last fall was a dramatic Iris Inkjet print of 1999 by Annie Leibovitz in which her subject is the Martha Graham dancer Terese Capucilli. Leibovitz's subject arranges her lanky body in a pose reminiscent of the studio models of the 19th century, but the effect is anything but academic. The lush but limited color scheme of the iris print and the tension of the pose creates an atmosphere that is mysterious and captivating.