Friday

My Day at SFMOMA




With still two months remaining to see the Garry Winogrand exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there is no time better then to schedule a date with one’s self and experience a visual treat.  


Arriving an hour early at SFMOMA, believing they open at 10, I headed for Chinatown, my favorite haunt for taking pictures of people but returning just in time for the special lecture given by Erin O’Toole, Assistant Curator at SFMOMA.



Erin O’Toole lecturing about Garry Winogrand


The forty-five minute lecture was very informative, it also left a number of questions, questions to which I wanted answers. Particularly were any of the unprocessed films developed, especially were the posthumous prints made conventionally made using the original negative exposed to gelatin silver paper or were the negatives scanned and printed digitally. 


For a weekday the museum was crowded, especially packed at the Winogrand exhibit. The museum had dedicated nine rooms and a couple of display cases featuring letters and contact sheets. The quantity of prints, from original to posthumous was almost overwhelming but it was clearly reflected an excellent cross-section of his life’s work.



SFMOMA Garry Winogrand exhibition


In the end, I stopped off at the gift shop and purchased the SFMOMA Garry Winogrand catalogue book, well worth the price and allowing me to relive the exhibit for time to come.


While at SFMOMA, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there was also another major photographic exhibit, Picturing Modernity. Much of the work presented was street photography and featured works by Lee Friedlander; Joel Meyerowits, Diane Arbus; and my favorite, Weegee AKA: Arthur H. Fellig.


There were also a number of names that I had not heard of before, like Bruce Davidson; Anne Fishbein; Chris Killip; Morris Engel; Ara Güler from Turkey and Arnold Genthe from Germany.


If you are visiting San Francisco or live here, please take note that SFMOMA will be closed as of June 3 for three years. The reason for the closing it’s doors is that they are expanding in order to make room for the 1,100 works by 185 artists. Over the years, the Doris and Donald Fisher compilation is a museum-quality collection of works by 20th- and 21st-century American and European masters from movements including Pop Art, Figurative Art, Minimalism, Abstraction, Conceptualism, Photorealism, and Color-field painting. Some of these works were first shown in 2010 at SFMOMA.





LINKs:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website

SFMOMA information on Garry Winogrand

SFMOMA information on Picturing Modernity


All photographs taken with an iPhone 4S by
©2013 Egmont van Dyck - All Rights Reserved








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