As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, Columbia’s Museum of Contemporary Photography is using a new exhibition to reflect on how photography has responded to social change across generations.
The exhibition features photographs, videos and installations spanning from the 1970s to the present, highlighting key acquisitions throughout the museum’s 50-year history.
Kristin Taylor, the museum’s curator of academic programs and collections, told the Chronicle that 150 pieces were selected for the anniversary exhibit from the museum’s collection of 18,000 artworks by 2,000 artists.
“We selected many works that had never been exhibited before, alongside others that speak more broadly to photography and archives,” Taylor said in an email. “My hope with every exhibition is that students and visitors encounter something new and leave feeling more curious about photography and its unique capacity for storytelling.”
Five galleries each represent a decade, beginning with the most recent from 2016 through 2026 and then going backward in time.
The photograph “Blue Woman Blindfolded” by American Eileen Cowin caught the eye of Deangelo Handley, a photography student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
The 1990 silver dye bleach print was a gift to the museum.
“I really like that one a lot due to how it provokes emotion,” Handley said. “The photographer was intentionally playing with color psychology to be able to provoke something within a person, and it draws me so much with that.”
The MoCP, located at 600 S. Michigan Ave., was founded in 1976 as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography.
When it began collecting, much of its focus was on pushing back against narrow definitions of contemporary photography. It almost exclusively collected American artworks.
In the early 2000s, the museum began to expand beyond that. The shift broadened what entered the collection and changed how the museum approached photography as a medium.
The museum embraced a new mission, “to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the artistic, cultural and political implication of the image in our world today.”
One of the pieces in the anniversary exhibit is by Czechoslovakian artist Josef Ehm. “Imaginary Spaces II” uses the solarization effect to turn a familiar fragment of the body into something unique and uncanny.
Lysander Soto, who graduated from Columbia in 2023 with a bachelor’s in film and television, was drawn to it during an opening reception on Thursday, Jan. 29.
“I just like that the man has a feminized leg,” Soto said. “I mean, it could also be a woman. It’s the masculine element that’s coming out.”
In the past 10 years, the MoCP acquired just over 3,800 works. A third of the artists were internationally based, nearly 10 times the number in the first two decades since it was founded, according to the museum.
Zayden German, a senior photography major and an operation assistant at MoCP, said the museum seeks art that allows for people to think more critically about society, social climate and awareness of life.
“We try to be very inclusive of our art,” German said.
The exhibition, “MoCP at Fifty: Collecting Through the Decades,” will run through the spring semester and close May 17.
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