Facebook: Images of People in Photographs from the Permanent Collection

Drawn from The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center collection of close to 3,000 photographs, this exhibition examined the development of the photographic portrait from the 19th century until the present. The title Facebook refers to both actual books featuring pages of students’ headshots that are distributed by some colleges as a way to get to know other people on campus and the immensely popular social networking website where one can find millions of photographs of faces linked to searchable biographical data. While the enormous popularity of the web site is a sign of the times, the notion of collecting pictures of people is not a new one—August Sander created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people from all walks of life in his monumental, lifelong project to document the residents of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. From Sander’s iconic portraits of the 1920s to the unique personalities captured by visionary artist Diane Arbus in the 1960s and from the theatrical fictions created by Cindy Sherman in the 1970s to the deadpan views of ordinary New Yorkers by Rineke Dijkstra in the 1990s, this exhibition featured some of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Other artists whose work was included in the exhibition include Berenice Abbott, Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lee Freidlander, Nan Goldin, Mark Goodman, Lewis W. Hine, Helen Levitt, Sally Mann, Paul Strand, Weegee, and Gary Winogrand among others. This illustrated brochure features a critical essay by curator Mary-Kay Lombino and a complete checklist of the 55 works in the exhibition.