Guest curator Patricia Leighten, Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Duke (right), who co-organized Light Sensitive with Nasher Museum Director Sarah Schroth, leads a tour of the exhibition. Photo by J Caldwell.
Light Sensitive includes over 100 works, from tiny early daguerreotypes to large-scale contemporary color prints and videos, and is drawn from twelve public and private North Carolina collections. The exhibition is structured to challenge the widespread notion of the photographic medium as a form of mere realism. Understanding of photographic media suffers from the long-standing myth that a camera is an ‘innocent eye’ that transparently records an image of the world as if through an open window. Some of the power of photography comes precisely from faith in this myth, a myth that has been extremely useful in photographic journalism, in courtrooms, on television and on the internet, despite a long history of visual alteration ranging from subtle artistic manipulation to deliberate propagandistic deceit. Though the camera is capable of recording images of the world in astonishing detail, a great variety of photographic tools and techniques can work to take ordinary features of a photograph—light and dark, shape and form, depth and space, size and scale, soft and sharp focus—and transform them into elements that alter our vision.
