Inspired by photography’s inextricable relationship with time, this selection of pictures from the museum’s permanent collection invites an intimate reflection on the concept of time and our place within it. Photographs both represent and are the product of specific frames of time. Often this time frame is incredibly brief—a mere fraction of a second—but sometimes it is protracted, spanning more than a day’s worth of activity. The amount of time measured in a photograph is always by definition a moment in the past. As a result, photographs often trigger powerful memories and a sense of nostalgia, drawing attention to the distance in time between us and them and forcing us to confront questions of transformation, relativity, and mortality. As moments extracted from a larger continuum, they encourage us to imagine what is not there: the sequence of events leading up to and following the moment that they depict. And at their most artful, when formal plays of light and shadow meet saturated color or selective focus, photographs can even conjure a sense of timelessness.

Made over 130 years, these works from disparate periods and places explore themes from the instantaneous or fragmentary to the perpetual or enduring, and the transformative or evolutionary. In some, time is both the subject and object (as in the work of Ilse Bing) whereas others address time more conceptually or metaphorically (Tom McNease, Wolfgang Tillmans). In other instances, the relationship to time is drawn out through the intentional pairing and juxtaposition of images. Some even represent multiple layers of time within a single space (Joel Sternfeld, Francis Frith), and prompt site-specific considerations on the notion of time within the context of this museum’s entire permanent collection, which spans 5,000 years of human history. Finally, these works ask you to consider how light and space in a photograph become markers of time, directing us to a particular moment in a day or provoking meditation of time on a geologic scale.

This exhibition is organized by guest curator Todd Rennie.