The location of a show of photography in a set of rooms subsidiary to Now WHAT? could foster the impression that it is of secondary value. It is most emphatically not.
A survey of work by masters including Diane Arbus, John Coplans, Walker Evans and Vik Muniz, STARE: The Pleasures of the Intensely Familiar and the Strangely Unexpected is–as the Norton puts it–“about the shock that only a photograph can invoke and the minutiae, the details within the image that can only be discovered when the viewer gets up close and personal.” The many approaches on display–from Arbus’s pathetic, unsettling humanism to Muniz’s cerebral neo-ephemera, Evans’s gritty documentarianism and Coplans’s deconstructive geographies of the body—provide a striking, illuminating primer on the power of the photographic medium.
John Coplans
STARE: The Pleasures of the Intensely Familiar and the Strangely Unexpected
Norton Museum of Art
Through March 13, 2011
www.norton.org