The Human Presence: Photographs from the Collection

Since photography’s invention in Europe in 1839, photographers have attempted to reveal nothing less than the infinite span of human experience. This exhibition presents modern and contemporary photographs featuring people as their subject, each with their own presence, bearing, and character. Reaching beyond traditional portraiture, these sensitively-made images suggest states of psychology and mood while evoking private and, at times, intimate facets of gender, race, sexuality, and identity. Spontaneously taken or deliberately composed, all these photographs demonstrate the camera’s uncanny, and all but unique, ability to variously reflect, question, affirm, and sometimes revel in what it means to be present within a human form.