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MoMA announces an Exhibition of Photography and the American West

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Sunday, 28 December 2008 01:09

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) - Untitled Film Still #43, 1979 - Gelatin silver print, 19.2 x 24 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York - © 2009 Cindy Sherman 

NEW YORK, NY -  Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West examines how photography has pictured the idea of the American West, from 1850 to the present. Photography’s development coincided with the exploration and the settlement of the West, and their simultaneous rise resulted in a complex association that has shaped the perception of the West’s physical and social landscape to this day. For over 150 years, the image of the West has been formed and changed through a variety of photographic traditions and genres, and this exhibition at MoMA considers the medium’s role in shaping our collective imagination of the West.

Into the Sunset brings together over 120 photographs made by a variety of photographers. The works in the exhibition consider photography’s role in popularizing ideas of the sublime landscape, Manifest Destiny, and the land of opportunity, as well as describing a more complex vision of the West, addressing cultural dislocation, environmental devastation, and failed social aspirations. The exhibition includes photographs dating from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, incorporating a range of artistic strategies, motifs, and concerns. Organized thematically, Into the Sunset features the work of approximately 70 photographers, including Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston, and Carleton E. Watkins.

Visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) at : www.moma.org/

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