What Can Pictures Say in a World Stuffed with Pictures?

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An exhibition on the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College examines how artists make the most of serial configurations of images and textual content to immediate questions on seeing.

In the early Seventies, the optometrist and photographer Milton Rogovin made a sequence of portraits of residents within the Lower West Side, a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. He then photographed them twice extra, a decade aside every time. Families develop. Some endure losses. The surrounding structure modifications. Rogovin created a time capsule, an ode to a group in transition. We know the adage about how a lot one image is price — {a photograph} encapsulates a second; the narrowing of the aperture works inversely to the creativeness, which is given house to take a position. But a sequence of pictures, particularly accompanied by textual content, fills within the blanks.

Storytelling: Photographers Making Meaning | Works from the Wellin Museum’s Collection, a brand new exhibition on the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, examines how photographers make the most of sequence of pictures, typically with textual content, to create new narratives. Rogovin’s Lower West Side Revisited is included alongside 9 different sequence and a site-specific set up by photographer Keisha Scarville.

“We are bombarded with a barrage of imagery on a near-constant basis,” Tracy L. Adler, the Museum’s Johnson-Pote Director, instructed Hyperallergic. “This exhibition encourages us to bring a new criticality to the imagery we are exposed to in our everyday lives … It’s in our nature to make mental connections to visual stimuli, to tell stories.”

Collections Curator Elizabeth Shannon, who described Rogovin’s sequence as “endlessly moving,” has “long been fascinated with how different photographers have used the building blocks of image and text to create very different projects.” For Storytelling, she checked out works by Twentieth- and Twenty first-century American artists; the exhibition, she explains, can be highlighting work that Hamilton College college students and school may not have recognized belonged to the gathering, doubtlessly prompting additional examine.