Getty Center Photography Exhibit: Urban Panoramas

ArtKnowledgeNews on the Getty in 2010.
 

LOS ANGELES, CA.- On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, February 2 through June 6, 2010, “Urban Panoramas: Opie, Liao, Kim” brings together bodies of work by three contemporary photographers that recently entered the Museum’s collection. Each artist explores a specific city and how various modes of transportation define the urban infrastructure. Selections from Catherine Opie’s “Mini-malls” series, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s “Habitat 7″ series, and Soo Kim’s “Midnight Reykjavík” series will be on display. This exhibition will run concurrently with A Record of Emotion: The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans.

Based in Los Angeles, Catherine Opie used 7×17-inch film negatives to document the mini-malls that are ubiquitous in a city traversed by automobiles. To trace the route of the number 7 subway line connecting Queens and Manhattan in New York, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao used digital technology to combine multiple 8×10-inch negatives into seamless prints. Working with a 2¼-inch format camera in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, during the summer solstice, Soo Kim cut and layered the resulting chromogenic prints to suggest the transparency of a city characterized by pedestrian accessibility.

“This exhibition highlights three distinctive bodies of work, each of which explores a specific aspect of urban architecture to capture the essential rhythm of a city,” says Virginia Heckert, associate curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. “Paired with photographs by Fredrick Evans, who worked in England from 1890–1910, these two concurrent exhibitions provide a wonderful opportunity to compare and contrast changing approaches to photographic documentation of architecture over the course of a century….”

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao at the Getty Center