The Photograph as Poetry

Held at the Pasadena Art Museum, The Photograph as Poetry included black-and-white photographs by nine West Coast photographers. The artists represented were Ansel Adams (1902–1984), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), Dick McGraw (1905–1978), William Webb, Don Worth (1924–2009), William Garnett (1916–2006), Wynn Bullock (1902–1975), Brett Weston (1911–1993) and Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006). In the exhibition catalogue, curator Thomas W. Leavitt presented the show as an effort to “reaffirm the role established for the camera by the generation of Stieglitz, Strand, and Weston.” The Californian landscape featured prominently throughout the photographers’ works, with vistas ranging from William Garnett’s views of the Death Valley basin to Ansel Adams’s towering visions of Yosemite’s peaks. Following its close at the Pasadena Art Museum, the exhibition traveled to the University of Oklahoma; Davenport Municipal Art Gallery; Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Wisconsin; University of Michigan Art Department; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.