During a week when NOMA’s team looks toward our permanent collection for examples of plant life and floral beauty, it may seem strange to focus on the humble cabbage. Carlotta Corpron’s Nature Dancer, however, elevates leaves of Chinese cabbage out of the kitchen and into our imaginations. The sense of motion is incredible, and at… Read More

In the late 1970s, Richard Misrach produced a group of photographs in Louisiana that made dramatic use of long exposures and stroboscopic lighting. Here, the intermittent blasts of light on the row of cypress trees obliterate the detail of the trunks and transform a set of rough, textured surfaces into a group of smooth vertical… Read More

Although Imogen Cunningham’s earliest photographs were soft-focused, often ethereal studies of friends presented as allegories, she would become best known for images such as this one, which presented forms in nature or the human body as richly descriptive statements of fact. Trained as a chemist at the University of Washington, Cunningham also went on to… Read More

The rose trémière, or hollyhock, is a classic summer bloom with flowers arranged vertically on long stems. Eugéne Atget came across this hollyhock in a Paris, where he roamed the streets with his view camera every morning. Beginning about 1890, Atget made “documents pour artistes”: straightforward photographs of buildings, parks, flowers, and sculptures that he… Read More

This unique photograph, made without using a camera, has a wonderful story behind its creation, much of which is written directly on the surface of the photograph. The word “photograph” encompasses a wide variety of processes, practices, materials, and objects. Today, it is used to describe images on paper, glass, or metal, as well as… Read More