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The Amazing & The Immutable

February 2 – March 13, 2004
USF Contemporary Art Museum

Images (left to right): Lewis Hine, The Little Spinner, Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908, silver print, 7 x 5 inches, Drapkin Collection; Roe Ethridge, Car Carrier, New York Harbor, 2002, C-print, 50 x 40 inches, Margulies Collection.

Selected vintage and contemporary photographic works from the Florida collections of Robert Drapkin and Martin Margulies

The Amazing & The Immutable is an exhibition combining and contrasting vintage and contemporary photographic-based work from the distinguished Florida collections of Robert Drapkin and Martin Margulies. This unique perspective offers an opportunity to explore the collectors’ passion for photography in two eras of crisis for the medium: the 19th century when photography sought to define itself in relation to painting, and the turn of the 21st century when digital forms are the issue. Both collections contain examples of classic subject matter that, when compared, allow an examination of photographic practice over time, and reveal evolutions in format, formal content, perspective, technique and process.

The Amazing & The Immutable includes examples of portraiture, landscape, and narrative photography, addressing themes of architecture, the human figure, war, and industry. Artists include Eugene Atget, Edward Baldus, Vanessa Beecroft, Mathew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, Rineke Dijkstra, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Olafur Eliasson, Bisson Freres, Alexander Gardner, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Izima Kaoru, Jean-Pierre Khazem, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Struth, and William Henry Fox Talbot. Among the techniques represented are daguerrotype, ambrotype, photogravure, platinum, albumen, salt, silver gelatin, cibachrome and chromogenic development.

Companion Didactic Exhibition:
(Im) Printed Pictures:
Photographic Prints from the
Drapkin Collection and Graphicstudio

Concurrently Graphicstudio will house a didactic exhibit of the apparatus and methods involved in the fabrication and printing of photographs.

Symposium: Content & Continuity

Friday, February 6, 2004, 10am–Noon at Marshall Center

Panelists include collectors Robert Drapkin and Martin Margulies, curator/author Roger Kingston and Norton Museum of Art curator of photography Virginia Heckert; moderated by Margaret Miller, Director of the Institute for Research in Art. The panel will discuss the exhibition and collecting philosophies.