Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World

This first collaboration between the George Eastman Museum of Film and Photography and the Morgan Library & Museum explores the history of the camera as a lucid, literate—and not always literal—tool of persuasion. Works ranging from the 1840s to the present will reveal the many ways a photograph can transmit not only the outward appearance of its subject but also intricate arguments, narratives, and ideas. In Sight Reading, a great diversity of material—pioneering x-rays and aerial views, artifacts of early photojournalism and recent works of conceptual art—will meet in conversational pairings that draw many depths of meaning out of each object.

Photography by William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, John Heartfield, Lewis Hine, Harold Edgerton, John Baldessari, Sophie Calle, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among many others, will be drawn primarily from the world-renowned collection of Eastman Museum.

Sight Reading is co-organized by the Morgan Library & Museum and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester. The exhibition in New York is made possible by Jane P. Watkins.

Image Caption: 

László Moholy-Nagy (American, b. Hungary 1895–1946), Massenpsychose, 1927. Photomontage of photomechanical and drawn (ink and pencil) elements. Overall: 64.2 x 49.2 cm (25 1/4 x 19 3/8 in.); matted: 86 x 71 cm (33 7/8 x 27 15/16 in.). George Eastman Museum, purchased from Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company 1981.2163.0049.

Courtesy of George Eastman Museum. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Reproduction, including downloading of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.