Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of couple Cities The Art Institute of Chicago Chicago.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of couple Cities

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

May 8-September 12 1999

Museum of Fine Arts

Houston, Texas

October 17 1999-January 2 2000

Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

September 25 1999-January 16 2000

The Whitney Museum of American Art

strange York, New York

February 22-May 27 2001

Ray K Metzker: Landscapes

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

November 18 2000-February 11 2001

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of couple Cities

Colin Westerbeck, with contributions at Arata Isozaki and Fuminori Yokoe

Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago (distributed according to University of Washington Press), 1999

144 pp/$2995 (sb)

Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective

Sylvia Wolf with an essay by the agency of Andy Grundberg and a chronology and interview according to Stephanie Lipscomb

Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago (distributed through D.A.P.), 1999

200 pp/$3500 (sb)

City Stills

Ray K Metzker with an introduction at Lawrence G. Miller

Munich, London, fresh York: Prestel, 1999

96 pp/$3995 (hb)

Ray K Metzker: Landscapes

Evan H Turner

of recent origin York: Aperture, 2000

160 pp/$5000 (hb)

Traditions of photography can form for the serious close examiner a strangling noose, a hobbling crutch a ladder to freedom.

Arthur Siegel [1]

In 1961 Aperture dedicated an issue to photography by way of five recent and current graduate learners of Chicago's Institute of Design (I.D.): Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson Ray Metzker Joseph Sterling and Charles Swedlund. All received the Master of Science in Photography step from I.D. between 1959 and 1962 making them among the first photographers in the political division to hold such a class [2] In 1950 the I.D. became the first American art educate to offer a graduate program in photography, granting its first advanced grades in 1952. So it is not surprising that Aperture's editor Minor White--himself a photography professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Josephson had been an undergraduate--opens the issue from welcoming the new initiates. He congratulates their hometown in succession doing the same: "Yearly a not many arrive at the threshold of camera work. nevertheless only in Chicago does the city art museum acknowledge 'arrival' with a public exhibition." [3]

Hugh Edwards, who became the Art Institute of Chicago's first Curator of Photography in 1959 also championed the work of these young photographers--a favor he lengthen outed to many young photographers who came to prominence at the time. [4] Between 1959 and 1963 he gave Metzker Jachna and Swedlund solo exhibitions. Edwards helped Josephson secure his teaching job at the indoctrinate of the Art Institute in 1960 and gave him a solo exhibition in 1971 [5] The Art Institute would provide Josephson a residence for the remainder of his creative life, With its seminary and museum under one vault the institution embodied in its to a high degree architecture the new professionalism in the arts.

Times have certainly changed. Today it takes more than an advanced quality and a portfolio for a photographer to achieve a museum show, and museum point outs of photography are no longer rare. Like greatest in quantity museums, the Art Institute of Chicago fancys established artists to new uniteds Now--thanks to the pioneering efforts of Edwards, White and the I.D., among others--there is an academic tradition of art photography for museums to support At the time, what Edwards did was like exhibiting graffiti in a museum today--bringing Stephen Dedalus's proverbial "shout in the street" indoors. if it were not that as a result of his work, not many of the photographers Edwards championed imitate street artists at the extremity of their careers. Photography's history is replete of such tales of domestication.

Now the first generation of I.D. photography graduates are retiring from their teaching work at jobss and having retrospectives--many of them at the Art Institute, fittingly enough. In 1999 the museum hung major retrospectives of Yasuhiro Ishimoto (who received the Bachelor of Science standing from I.D. in 1952, nevertheless returned to the school informally between 1958 and 1961) and Kenneth Josephson (The Ishimoto point out to traveled to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Josephson's retrospective go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs its curator Sylvia Wolf to just discovered York's Whitney Museum this coming winter.) Also in 1999 German publisher Prestel issued a contortion of Ray Metzker's City Stills, featuring early work from his Chicago years alongside later installments of his expressionist road photography. Aperture is about to publish a dimensions of the experimental landscape photographs Metzker has been making since 1985 as the catalog of an exhibition opening in November at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and tentatively scheduled to travel. The Art Institute plans a c omprehensive observe of I.D. photographers for 2002 entitled "Taken by way of Design: Photography from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971" It will include work through the school's founder, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (whose plan was to reinvent the Bauhaus, where he taught until the Nazis clos the celebrated German design school) and its best known photography teachers Harry Callahan, Gyorgy Kepe Arthur Siegel and Aaron Siskind, along with graduates Barbara Crane, Nathan Lerner Richard Nickel, Art Sinsabaugh and others, in addition to those mentioned above. Edwards's successor David Travis will curate the point out to A Sinsabaugh retrospective is being prepared by the agency of the Indiana University Art Museum, which possesss his archive of slender Midwestern panoramas. Scheduled for 2004 it will in all likelihood stop at the Art Institute too. [6]