Pérez Art Museum Miami

When scrolling through social media and seeing hundreds or thousands of photographs every day and even posting a few ourselves, it can become difficult to think of a time when cameras weren’t in all our pockets. But for a majority of their history so far, that was the case. There was a time when cameras and the photographs they produced were novel and luxury items only the rich could afford. As the technology was developed from early large format plate negatives to smaller 35mm mirror-based cameras, they became not only smaller but also cheaper and as a result more accessible to working class artists who began to take photographs of the world around them. However, at the same time photographers from more privileged backgrounds also documented the world around them, including people in difficult conditions. This often created unbalanced power dynamics in the representations of people along with the sensationalizing of images. These issues created dialogue between photographers around what made a photograph “real” or “truth” and what didn’t. This conversation and problem persist to this day in the same way and with the development of photo altering technologies and, more recently, the development of artificial intelligence that generates images.  

Untitled, Harlem, New York by Gordon Parks is an archival pigment print that measures two and half feet tall by approximately three feet wide. The photo is in landscape format, meaning that its longest side runs parallel to the ground. 

Park’s photograph shows a tightly packed crowd on the streets of 1960s Harlem. The photo shows the crowd from the waist up, gazing past the viewer as they all look in unison at something that is outside the frame. Some of the onlookers are smiling, while others’ faces are relaxed but focused.  

 We see a young boy in the foreground and slightly off centered to the right. The boy is wearing a black suit with a blue tie–the blazer is a bit loose on his small frame. He is leaning his weight onto his right hand, which sits outside the frame, face focused on whatever is ahead.  

Just behind the young boy in the suit, centered in the frame, a man holds an open newspaper close to his chest while smiling and looking onward. The newspaper is a copy of Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam from 1960 to 1975, founded by a group of Elijah Muhammad’s ministers, including Malcolm X. The headline reads “OUR FREEDOM CAN’T WAIT!” a quote by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, in bold, capital letters. Underneath the headline there is a photograph of a Black man in a black suit and tie on the cover. 

This man and boy are flanked by two older women on their left. The woman closest to the man also clutches a rolled-up copy of newspaper in her right arm. Her mouth is curled into a pout that also seems proud, and her eyes look wide through her gold-rimmed, cat-eye shaped sunglasses. The woman directly behind her and to our left smiles onward, with her own pair of cat eye shades, red polka dot dress, pearl necklace and straw hat. Half of her body disappears out of the frame.  

While these people are in sharp focus, the hundreds of onlookers that surround them softly fade out into a sea of faces. The only signs of the street corner they occupy are the brownstones that jut out from behind their heads and cover the upper third of the photo. 

The often shaky relationship to truth that surrounds photography can be traced further back than the development of 35mm film. In fact, in the mid 1800s a style of photography now known as spirit photography became popular. Photographers learned that with longer exposures it was possible to create faint, transparent, and ghost-like impressions next to traditional portraits. These often theatrical and staged photographs set the precedent for contemporary photographers to perform in front of the camera and use its ability to produce realistic lies to convey the ideas they have. Artists like Cindy Sherman, Sheida Soleimani, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are all part of a history of artists who place themselves in front of the camera and physically act out the ideas and stories they wish to express. Much like the early spirit photographers, these artists use the unstable relationship to reality that photography has to their own benefit.  

El Cuerpo del Silencio (or “The Body of Silence”) is a photograph of a performance by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. It is a chromogenic print, meaning that this photo was printed with light sensitive paper. Overall, the photo measures about two and three quarters feet tall by just under two feet across. It is in vertical orientation, meaning that its shortest side runs parallel to the ground.

The photograph shows the artist sitting naked in a room covered in raw lamb meat. She sits with her knees bent and cradles an open book to her chest that is also covered in raw meat. She is clutching a green sharpie in her right hand. Her shoulders and head are leaning forward as she licks one of the pages. The image has a stark, dramatic quality with bright lighting that appears to be coming from the bottom left and casting harsh shadows to the right. The photograph is framed within the film’s borders, with sprockets and technical information visible on the margins.

This image documents a performance artwork created by Tania Bruguera in 1997-1998. The performance documented in this photograph took place in Cuba during a period of strict government control over historical narratives and public expression. The performance consisted of two parts: In the first part, Bruguera used a green felt-tip marker to make corrections to an official book of Cuban history. In the second part, she licked her own writing off the pages, nearly chewing the book itself in the process.

According to the artist’s statements about this work, the act of writing on and subsequently consuming official historical text was intended as a physical manifestation of censorship practices. The performance was part of Bruguera’s broader body of work examining power structures, historical documentation, and bodily experience in post-revolutionary Cuba.

Once photography became accessible to most people, families began to archive their personal histories by photographing each other and special events. The family photo album was the result, and this personal index of history helped influence the type of photographic practice in this section of the exhibition. Arranging grids of images within a family album required curation of images. Choosing the ones that look the best and deciding what order to place them in. This is much like the practice of selecting negatives to prints in a dark room and posting to social media. The often repetitive and redundant process of photography that was developed over time inspired artists to create grids and arrays of images that used photography’s ability to reproduce images and create images with slight variations.  

Mike Kelly’s Photo Show Portrays the Familiar 1-26 features twenty-five black and white photographs in matching black frames with white borders, arranged in a grid on the gallery wall. Each frame, custom-made by the artist, measures nearly two feet tall and just over two feet wide. 

Named after a local newspaper headline, “Photo Show Portrays the Familiar” takes us through Kelley’s teenage years in Michigan. Using a traditional photography technique called gelatin silver printing (known for its deep blacks and rich detail), Kelley turns everyday scenes into a personal visual diary. 

The photographs show different parts of his world, including: 

 

Personal Spaces 

• Photos of both Kelley’s family home and his grandmother’s house. These homes appear as simple structures with yards and porches, though the photographs don’t tell us which home belongs to whom. 

• Natural areas with woods, winding country roads, and open landscapes that show the Michigan environment where Kelley grew up. 

• Halloween decorations shown in sharp black and white, capturing seasonal objects that were part of childhood traditions 

• An abandoned amusement park with empty structures and overgrown paths. 

Community and Public Spaces 

• A religious statue photographed head-on against a brick wall with some plants nearby, making it stand out clearly in black and white 

• Local businesses, including what looks like a small hamburger stand, are shown in a simple style that captures their everyday importance. 

• A sculpture displayed in a mall, the artwork looking somewhat out of place among the shopping areas around it. 

Cultural and Historical Elements: 

• Pottery and artifacts from the Ford Museum, some shown in display cases and others against plain backgrounds. The photographs highlight the handmade details and designs on these objects. 

• Factory buildings with tall smokestacks rising against the sky, showing Michigan’s history of manufacturing. 

• The Detroit Renaissance Center, a group of modern towers photographed from a distance. Built in the 1970s by Ford Motor Company to help improve downtown Detroit, this landmark shows the city’s attempts to rebuild during Kelley’s youth. 

• Entrances to what Kelley called “secret passageways,” photographed with a sense of mystery that keeps their childhood importance. 

The black and white style creates unity across these different subjects, while the identical framing gives them equal importance. Through this arrangement, Kelley shows how ordinary places and objects become meaningful parts of our personal histories and shared memories. 

Among the novelties of photography upon its creation was its ability to reproduce the likeness of a person in a way no other medium could. In a way as close to reality that was arguably possible. This brought with it difficult discussions about who gets to photograph who and when. Consent and representation are core issues of contemporary photography. Some states require consent in public while others don’t. A famous example is from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Head series. In 2005, Erno Nussenzweig sued Lorca diCorcia for exhibiting and selling images of his likeness without his consent. The image was from this series of photographs and ultimately the New York Supreme Court ruled in favor of the artist, seemingly agreeing that by virtue of being art the artist is able to not only take the picture but profit from it. The ethics of this kind of photography is still a topic of debate between photographers.  

Head #11 is a photograph by the artist Philip-Lorca diCorcia. It is about four feet tall and five feet across. The portrait is in horizontal orientation, meaning that it is wider than it is tall. 

The picture captures an older Black police officer from the shoulders up. He wears a traditional police uniform with a dark jacket, a badge you can see clearly, a police hat with an official emblem, and a light blue shirt collar visible underneath. His serious face that is looking downward stands out against the dark background, making the portrait look dramatic. 

 

This photo is part of diCorcia’s “Head” series (1999-2001), which was an important project that changed traditional street photography. To create these photos, diCorcia set up his camera on a stand in Times Square, New York. He attached bright strobe lighting to scaffolding across the street. Then he would take pictures of people walking by without them knowing. 

The process of making photographic prints traditionally involves light sensitive paper, dark rooms, machines called enlargers, chemicals and time keeping. Enlargers project selected negatives onto light sensitive paper which is then dipped in an array of chemicals in a specific order for a specific amount of time before being dried and flattened. While in dark rooms, artists discovered that they could create photograms. Photograms are images made using light sensitive paper and without a camera. Objects could be placed on the paper to create shapes that would allow artists to create new experimental forms of photographs. It is from this type of experimentation that abstract images like the ones made by Barbara Kasten became possible and lead to a wave of artists in both photography and filmmaking to make non-camera photographic art which again put into question the nature of photography and what constitutes a photograph.  

Architectural Site 3, Equitable Building New York, June 14, 1986 is a photograph by Barbara Kasten. It is a Cibachrome print, a process that produces high-quality color prints directly from positive transparencies or slides. The framed photo is large – about five feet tall and four feet wide and is hanging vertically (or taller than it is wide). 

 

The photo shows the interior of the Equitable Building (now known as the AXA Center) in New York City, featuring Roy Lichtenstein’s famous “Mural with Blue Brushstroke.” However, what makes this image distinctive is that Kasten has created an artistic intervention rather than simply documenting the space. 

 

Roy Lichtenstein’s famous “Mural with Blue Brushstroke” created in 1986 is a massive mural, measuring about 68 feet tall by 32 feet wide, and was specifically made for this building’s atrium. It shows his signature pop art style with bold colors and comic-book-like elements. In the photo, we can see parts of the mural including a dotted hand with red fingernails, geometric shapes, and swirling blue lines. Unlike most of Lichtenstein’s work that typically used only five colors, this mural incorporates 18 different colors, making it especially vibrant.  

Kasten’s photo shows both the actual architectural elements of the building and her own artistic additions. The dramatic angle of the shot creates a layered image where it’s deliberately difficult to tell the difference between the real Lichtenstein mural, the physical architecture, and Kasten’s interventions. She used reflective surfaces, lighting effects, and possibly additional geometric props or panels that interact with and fragment the view of Lichtenstein’s work. 

 

The cylindrical structures on the left side of the image are part of the actual building, while the red panels may be a combination of both architectural elements and Kasten’s manipulation of lighting. The plants visible in the lower portions of the photo are real elements within the atrium space, but Kasten has framed them to create visual tension with the geometric elements above. 

What might look like a simple picture is actually a carefully created image where Kasten has transformed the space through her photography approach. This is typical of her “Architectural Sites” series, where she doesn’t just take pictures of buildings but reimagines them through careful setup and camera angles. 

Photographers have been photographing buildings as part of their landscapes since the dawn of photography, in fact, the first photograph produced was of a landscape surrounded by buildings of the inventor’s estate. The tradition continues as a way for artists to capture places created by and inhabited by humans and they show our relationship to buildings as places of refuge, oppression, home, and displacement. These photographs can shape our view of history and help place a direct physical link between us and the past and our ancestors.  

Untitled (Barulho de fundo) (Untitled [Background Noise]), is a series of gelatin silver prints mounted on panel by Renata Lucas. Each print measures just a little over ten inches tall by fourteen inches wide. They are shown in landscape orientation, meaning that their longest side runs parallel to the ground. 

This collection of eight black and white photos shows security camera images of different views of the empty office spaces and hallways in the abandoned Ohtake Cultural Complex in São Paulo, Brazil. 

The series of photos are shown in a grid format with two neat rows consisting of four photos each. The images appear grainy with high contrast and capture a large space with concrete floors, visible ceiling pipes and beams, and fluorescent lighting. The complex has multiple staircases throughout. You can see these staircases most clearly in the first two images, where metal railings lead down to another floor. Additional staircases appear from different angles in the other photos. Metal support columns also appear consistently throughout most of the images. 

The space feels very basic and functional, with exposed air ducts and pipes running along the ceiling, concrete block walls particularly visible in the second image of the bottom row, and plain concrete floors throughout. You can see empty corridors connecting different sections in various shots, with doorways leading to other areas. The lighting is dim and creates dark shadowy areas, giving the whole place a cold, empty feeling that shows the building is not in use. 

In the first and last images of the bottom row, exotic animals that look like large cats can be seen walking through the space among the support columns – they have somehow gotten into the empty building and are now roaming freely through the hallways and corridors.  

Present in almost every photograph, nature and the landscape can serve as both the backdrop for portraits of people and buildings or as the subject itself. Photographers use nature to reflect on our impact on the world, as a material that can disturb the process of photography, or oftentimes, simply to preserve the beauty of a sunset. The land around us provides us with life and the ability to make art. For photographers it provides the paper and chemicals, and glass and metal needed to make images. It provides the baseline substance for every subject that has ever been in a photograph. But most importantly, it provides the light that makes every photograph possible. For as complex as a photograph can be, and as complicated as the ethics of a photograph can be, at its simplest a photograph and the art of photography is the art of capturing and preserving light.  

Untitled, numbers 56, 66 and 67, from the series Iceland, are a set of three photographs by Olafur Eliasson. These archival pigment prints mounted on aluminum measure about two feet tall by three feet wide. Each photograph is shown in horizontal orientation, meaning that their longest side runs parallel to the ground. 

These works are part of a series of images of Icelandic landscapes. Each of the three images depicts stark, volcanic landscapes with dark, rocky terrain. 

The top photograph features a barren, rocky field scattered with dark boulders across dusty, brownish ground. The landscape extends to the horizon under an overcast sky, creating a desolate, moon-like appearance. 

The middle photograph shows a dramatic scene with what appears to be a large mound or hill of dark volcanic material. In the foreground, there are two clumps of dried, golden-colored grass or vegetation that stand out against the dark ground. The lighting creates a moody, almost twilight atmosphere. 

The bottom photograph displays a rocky shoreline or riverbed covered with various sized stones, pebbles, and rounded rocks. The rocks range from small pebbles to larger stones, creating a natural mosaic pattern. In the background, there appears to be water and distant hills or mountains under a cloudy sky. 

We hope you enjoyed this Digital Exhibition Guide!

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