UCR/California Museum of Photography
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UCR / California Museum of Photography is an off-campus department of the University of California, Riverside, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
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[edit] About
UCR/California Museum of Photography provides a cultural presence, educational resource, community center and intellectual meeting ground for the university and the general public. The museum’s explorations of photographic media through exhibition, collection, publication, and the web examine the history of photography and showcase current practice in photography and related media. To serve an audience that is multicultural, young and old, general and specialized, the museum presents programs that recognize the variety and complexity of cultural experience and explore the relationship between traditional expression and contemporary practice. The museum is vitally concerned with the intersection of photography, new imaging media, and society. Located off campus in downtown Riverside, UCR/CMP is committed to bringing the most challenging art to the widest possible audience.
[edit] Relationship to Academic Program
UCR students from across the university are involved in every aspect of the museum’s program from curatorial research through collections management to exhibition installation and administration. The museum offers many opportunities for professional museum work and both UCR graduate and undergraduate students have held career staff positions. The Graduate Division, in conjunction with UCR/CMP funding, provides the Department of Art History with an annual CMP Graduate Student Fellowship. Other UCR students work with the museum under the aegis of independent course status, internships, work-study, and as volunteers. Still other students utilize the museum as a library-like resource or as a site for art production and experimentation. Classes in Art, Art History, and History are taught on occasion in the museum. Students from Dance, History, Art, and Art History have produced MA Thesis exhibitions at the museum in conjunction with major research in the museum’s collections.
[edit] History
[edit] 1970's
It was Chancellor Ivan Hinderaker’s vision and courage in the face of considerable criticism and the support of Robert Gleckner, then Dean of the College of Humanities that allowed the museum to go forward. The first exhibition took place in 1973, titled Revolution in a Box. It was held in the Art Gallery of the University of California, Riverside. Organized by UCR's Associate Dean of Fine Arts, Edward R. Beardsley and Pomona College's James Turrell, the exhibition was a "historical survey of photographica in two parts." Held jointly at UCR and the Gladys K. Montgomery Art Center at Pomona College during the first three months of 1973, Beardsley and Turrell conceived a split exhibition of photographic equipment and photographs surveying the history of the medium since its beginnings in 1839. While one institution presented an exhibition of cameras and viewing devices, the other presented a gallery show of prints; midway through the schedule the exhibitions switched venues.
Revolution in a Box provided audiences with an opportunity to see, among other things, rare Daguerreotype cameras, exquisite European and American folding cameras and elegant Graflex and Graphic cameras. The gallery show included vintage photographs by British landscape painter-turned photographer, David Octavious Hill, "Sweet Pepper" by Edward Weston, "Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley" by Ansel Adams and "Child in the Snow" by Wynn Bullock. In many respects, Revolution in a Box was a reflection of its time. In a year of tremendous social change in the United State it revealed the tremendous social impact and meaning of a medium.
UCR/CMP began its collections with the donation of what is now called the Bingham Collection of Technology and Apparatus. Riverside physician Dr. Robert Bingham was a nationally known camera collector and founder of the Western Photographic Collectors Association. Bingham's desire to find examples of all the cameras he had owned since boyhood led to the creation of a collection that became the foundation for the Western Camera Museum. Housed in Riverside's historic Mission Inn, the museum opened to the public in 1969, but soon outgrew its home. In response to a request from Edward Beardsley, Bingham allowed the Western Camera Museum's collections to be moved into storage in the Humanities Building at UCR in 1973 with the understanding that the collection was the responsibility of the fine art division of the College of Humanities. Several months later, a portion of the collection was put on display in the UCR Library, though the bulk of it remained in storage. Two years later, Popular Photography declared that UCR's Bingham Camera Collection was second only to the George Eastman House Collection in Rochester, New York and the collection of the Smithsonian Institute.
Joe Deal, the former Director of Exhibitions at International Museum of Photography in New York was hired as Assistant Professor of Art and part-time curator for the museum. Deal and Beardsley were soon confronted with a labor of love and a monumental task. The museum was to be honored with the donation of the stereographic archive of the Keystone Company a veritable world library of images published and mass-marketed by several large-companies at the turn-of-the-century. A plan was immediately set into motion to move the $1.2 million gift of prints, glass negatives and catalogues from Meadville, Pennsylvania to Riverside, California.
[edit] Keystone-Mast Collection
Today called the Keystone-Mast Collection it represents the largest surviving archive of stereographic photographs. In the early 1900's the Keystone Company of Meadville became the property of the Mast family of Davenport, Iowa. During the heyday of the stereograph, Keystone had purchased the negative libraries of many of its competitors including the Underwood Company. Following stereography's fall from fashion, the company went out of business and its archive was left to sit in a warehouse. When Mead Kibbey, the President of Sacramento's Black Diamond Lumber Company and a member of the Western Photographic Collectors Association learned of the collection he solicited the Mast family to donate it to the museum. With assistance from UCR Chancellor Ivan Hinderaker, Kibbey's request for the museum was a success. The heavy glass-plate negatives and stereo cards weighed more than 30 tons; arduous planning and backbreaking work were required to bring the collection to California. Jerome Laval, owner of the Graphic Technology Company of Fresno organized the move and Kibbey donated 1,000 custom built wooden crates for the shipment. The team effort to bring the collection to California was on behalf of history and scholarship. In 1977, Chancellor Hinderaker declared that the Keystone-Mast Collection "will materially enhance the instructional and research capabilities of our academic program in photography and in many other academic areas." Over the years, scholars and researchers have used the collection to better understand the past; it is the cornerstone of the museum's perspective on social and cultural history. Twenty-one years ago no one could have anticipated the role of the collection in 3D IMAX filmmaking and 3D digital photography for the World Wide Web. Through these new technologies, the collection is again available to mass audiences. From its stunning portrait of Mark Twain to its scenic tableaus of presidential parades and royal coronations to its documentation of the Civil War council of Generals Grant and Meade in Virginia, the Battleship Maine sinking in Cuban waters, the Wright Brother's airplane, the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and the violence of the Boxer Rebellion, the Keystone-Mast Collection supplies a window in to the past and brings attention to nineteenth century longings for what is today called virtual reality.
[edit] Print Collection Grows
The museum's interest in social history was not limited to stereography. In 1977, in addition to coping with the transcontinental move of the Keystone-Mast Collection, Joe Deal was also searching for a missing photographer. Raoul Gradvohl was the operator of a photography studio near the Los Angeles Civic Center who had disappeared some time earlier, leaving behind financial difficulty and thousands of photographs, many of them hand-tinted. Raoul Gradvohl's catalog of portraits of the people of downtown Los Angeles spanned nearly four decades. His most prolific years were in the first half of the 1940s. Gradvohl's photographs depict young couples, men in military uniforms, women in pompadours and the burlesque entertainers of the Burbank Theatre; they are a catalog of daily life, popular culture and Los Angeles' ethnic and racial diversity. The collection came to the attention of Deal and the museum following a search by the Los Angeles Times, owners of the building in which Gradvohl's abandoned studio was located. The fate of Gradvohl remains a mystery to this day; his life work, however, provides researchers and scholars unique insight into Los Angeles during the middle of the twentieth century.Gradvohl's photography was eventually incorporated into what would be called the University Print Collection which today also includes the F. Allan Morgan Collection of 1930s New York studio photography, the Haines Panoramic Photography Collection, the Harry Pidgeon Negative Collection and the Sweeney and Rubin Ansel Adam's Fiat Lux Collection.
The University Print Collection was initiated with the receipt on loan of the Setzer-Alexander/Friends of Photography portfolio of approximately 600 fine art prints by artists including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, as well as the most comprehensive collection of works by the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch. The collection was assembled by the Friends of Photography group formed in Carmel in 1967 by Ansel Adams and Wynn Bullock. In the early seventies, the organization's changing focus motivated the group to sell the collection. Upon learning of the potential sale Edward Beardsley began to explore ways to keep the collection intact and acquire it for the museum. With the help of Adams and Mead Kibbey, Beardsley identified two buyers for the collection. Hardie Setzer, a Sacramento lumber executive and Robert Alexander, a Sacramento physician offered funding to preserve the collection and place it on indefinite loan to the museum. Additionally, Adams donated ten of his own prints to the collection. Although it was inaugurated with a fine art collection, the University Collection maintained from its inception a dual investment in social history. In the late seventies, Mead Kibbey and Tim Hayes, co-publisher of the Riverside Press-Enterprise added to the University Collection a set of 60 documentary photographs by Walker Evans. The museum also accepted a donation from Wisteria Hartmann Linton of an assortment of photography and memorabilia by her father, Sadakichi Hartmann, noted as one of the world's first "bohemians" and internationally known for his fiery photography essays. One of the collection's subsets is comprised of the images of anonymous makers; the subset includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, autochromes, amateur snapshots and lantern slides. In 1978, the museum moved to new quarters.
On Saturday, December 2, the museum opened exhibitions in Watkins House off Canyon Crest. The following Sunday, the first meeting of the museum's first advisory board took place. Chaired by longtime museum benefactor Mead Kibbey, the board members included Robert Bingham; Jerry Laval; Mrs. Beth Mast; Ansel Adams; Seattle photography collector Joseph Monson; Howard H. Hays, editor and co-publisher of the Riverside Press Enterprise; Henry Coil, co-owner of Tilden-Coil; John Holland, past-President of the UCR In 1978, the museum moved to new quarters. On Saturday, December 2, the museum opened exhibitions in Watkins House off Canyon Crest. The following Sunday, the first meeting of the museum's first advisory board took place. Chaired by longtime museum benefactor Mead Kibbey, the board members included Robert Bingham; Jerry Laval; Mrs. Beth Mast; Ansel Adams; Seattle photography collector Joseph Monson; Howard H. Hays, editor and co-publisher of the Riverside Press Enterprise; Henry Coil, co-owner of Tilden-Coil; John Holland, past-President of the UCR Alumni Association; Eugene Ostroff, curator of photography for the Smithsonian Institute; and Wesley Hylen, a Riverside engineer. In 1978, the museum moved to new quarters. On Saturday, December 2, the museum opened exhibitions in Watkins House off Canyon Crest. The following Sunday, the first meeting of the museum's first advisory board took place. Chaired by longtime museum benefactor Mead Kibbey, the board members included Robert Bingham; Jerry Laval; Mrs. Beth Mast; Ansel Adams; Seattle photography collector Joseph Monson; Howard H. Hays, editor and co-publisher of the In 1978, the museum moved to new quarters. On Saturday, December 2, the museum opened exhibitions in Watkins House off Canyon Crest. The following Sunday, the first meeting of the museum's first advisory board took place. Chaired by longtime museum benefactor Mead Kibbey, the board members included Robert Bingham; Jerry Laval; Mrs. Beth Mast; Ansel Adams; Seattle photography collector Joseph Monson; Howard H. Hays, editor and co-publisher of the Riverside Press Enterprise; Henry Coil, co-owner of Tilden-Coil; John Holland, past-President of the UCR Alumni Association; Eugene Ostroff, curator of photography for the Smithsonian Institute; and Wesley Hylen, a Riverside engineer.
[edit] 1980's
In 1981, UCR/CMP came of age with the hiring of its first full-time director, Charles J. Desmarais. A well-known scholar, the former director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Desmarais was well prepared to continue pursuing founding museum director Edward R. Beardsley's dream to bring UCR/CMP national presence. As Desmarais pointed out that year, UCR/CMP "has already attracted international attention among the cognoscenti of photography, but it should be better known, and I think it can be." Desmarais set out to accomplish that goal by establishing a changing exhibition schedule, developing a publications program, initiating a membership program and professionalizing the staff.
The 1981-1982 season opened with Image and Technology: A Historical Overview from the Collections. This presentation of the history of photography charted the development of a technology, from 1850s daguerreotypes to contemporary color photography. It also displayed an 1880 Cirkut view camera for producing panorama photographs. Desmarais explained that the exhibition was intended to enable visitors to understand "how the technology of photography can affect the way we see our world, [and] how it has shaped the visual records we have made and preserved." Subsequent exhibitions of the early 1980s featured work by Richard Avedon, Harry Callahan, Chuck Close, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Thomas Neff, Herb Quick, W. Eugene Smith, Joel Sternfeld, Adam Clark Vroman and Edward Weston. Collections exhibitions of cameras and viewing devices as well as Keystone-Mast stereographs were also regularly shown. One of the highlights of the early 1980s was an exhibition of selections from a gift of photographs presented to the museum in honor of Desmarais by his former associates at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography. The collection of 48 prints from 23 Chicago photographers included works by Esther Parada and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. In Winter, 1982, the museum simultaneously presented Samuel Bourne: Photographs of India, 1863-1870 and Mary Ellen Mark, Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay. These contrasting shows by a nineteenth-century Englishman who made three expeditions into the Himalayas and a twentieth-century woman documentary photographer demonstrated the museum's early interest in presenting exhibitions that opened up opportunities for dialogue about the nature of photographic representation. Other topical areas that became the subjects for exhibitions included studies of Arkansas prison life, rituals of Brazilian Indians and the Law in Zinacantan, Mexico.
The museum first established its importance as a national voice in photographic study in 1979 with the exhibition catalog Alma Lavenson; it included an essay by Patricia Gleason Fuller. In 1981, the museum initiated its first periodical, the CMP Bulletin. The CMP Bulletin came into being when James Haddad of Haddad Fine Arts of Anaheim graciously ceased publication of Photo Image and offered his mailing list and printing services to the museum. Volume One, Number One, Lee Friedlander was a partial catalog of a museum exhibition; it featured an essay by Charles Desmarais. The issue noted that "Though [Friedlander] is an assertively contemporary picture maker, his work is a conscious blend of the themes, traditions and attitudes of photography's history. It is the object of the California Museum of Photography to strike this same balance of respect for what has come before, and aggressive pursuit of the possibilities of the future." The CMP Bulletin featured the work of artists including Kim Abeles, Yolanda Andrade, Stephen Axelrad, Cindy Bernard, Michael Bishop, Lisa Bloomfield, José Curi Brena, Lewis deSoto, Anthony Hernandez, Lucius Jarvis, Pedro Meyer, José Luis Neyra, Rubén Ortiz, Hahn Thi Pham and Joseph Squire. Special artist's issues were devoted to the work of Mark W. Berghash, Sarah Charlesworth, Linda Connor, Peter de Lory, Mike Mandel and Raoul Gradvohl.
In the early 1980s, the museum received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to host Jim Pomeroy and Kenneth Shorr as artists-in-residence to work on a project eventually titled Seeing Double. Edward Earle, the museum's former Associate Director for Collections and New Media Projects notes that "This was the first time any photography museum opened its collections to artists. The resulting CMP Bulletin [Reading Lessons and Eye Exercises/Ethical Idiocy-Esthetic Blindness] included work by both artists with layouts of their own design." Charles Desmarais observed in his introduction to the issue, "This Bulletin . . . comprises a sort of visual "final report" on what we believe to be a groundbreaking project. Seeing Double sets a precedent in cooperation between a public museum and artists andmore importantlyin reclamation of the past as the stuff of artistic discourse."
In addition to presenting art and items from the collections, issues offered critical essays by archivists, critics, artists and educators including Sheryl Conkelton, Joe Deal, Charles Desmarais, Edward Earle, Flor Garduno, Ulrich Keller, Chris J. Kenney, Dan Meinwald, Kenda North, Eugene Ostroff, Peter Palmquist and Alex Sweetman, as well as statements and polemics by writers including Deborah Bright, Martha Chahroudi, James Enyeart, Roy Flukinger, Peter Goin, David Hanson, Newton Harrison, Helen Mayer Harrison, Jeffrey Hoone, Bill Jaeger, Robert Mayer, Weston Naef, Stephen E. Ostrow, Joel Pérez, Marni Sandweiss, Rod Slemmons, Alan Sekula, Thomas W. Southhall, and Stephen Yates. One of the most unusual examples of the CMP Bulletin was The Photograph Album, an audio cassette recording of photography and popular song featuring Sam Cooke's "Send Me Some Lovin'," George Jones' "Developing My Pictures," Kay Starr's "Half a Photograph" and the Kinks' "People Take Pictures of Each Other."
Over the years, the CMP Bulletin's designers experimented with color, the use of 3D and unusual formats. Daguerre to Disc: The Evolution of the Camera unfolded to become a time-line poster by Mike Kessler featuring line drawings of camera models from 1830 to the 1980s; A Postcard History of Photography could be pulled apart into individual post cards; Return to El Dorado included a set of 3D glasses. The final volume was the aptly titled Memento Mori: Death In Nineteenth Century Photography.
Published quarterly until 1990, the CMP Bulletin gave focus to the museum's mission to promote photography and related visual media through research, exhibition, collections and instruction. Each year, the CMP Bulletin would feature issues devoted to camera and viewing technology, art work, collection issues and scholarship. A subscription gift to members, the CMP Bulletin was accompanied by Wrap-Up, the museum's first regular newsletter. It provided members with news about exhibitions and museum programs.
In 1982, the museum began its long history in film programming with a series of comedy film classics that included a showing of the 1941 Preston Sturges classic, Sullivan's Travels. The museum also began a series of public lectures and symposia by artists and scholars regarding both photography and its technology. In 1983, Beaumont Newhall spoke on the life and work of Edward Weston and the museum hosted the Second Western Photohistory Symposium, the guest speakers included Eugene Ostroff, Peter Palmquist, Robert Pins, Roy Flukinger and Eaton Lothrop. Through a bequest to the university in 1983, and a subsequent grant from the Institute of Museum Services, UCR/CMP purchased 50,000 acid-free paper enclosures to better conserve the Keystone-Mast Collection, and hired first, Jim Saxby and later, Nancy Baldwin to coordinate the program. Members of the Riverside chapter of the American Association of Retired People (AARP) generously donated their time towards accomplishing a monumental task. In this three-year program, the volunteers spent thousands of hours resleeving each individual glass-plate negative. Their hard work is still appreciated today by the many researchers, students and teachers who have explored the collection over the past fifteen years.
During the 1980s the museum also expanded its staff. In 1981, Cathleen Walling was hired as the museum's first administrative assistant; today, she is Associate Director. Over the years, Walling moved through a variety of jobs at UCR/CMP; she was instrumental to the formation of the museum's membership program and the planning and launching of the museum's capital campaign.
After serving as the Interim museum director following Edward R. Beardsley's departure, Katherine Warren continued as the museum's Associate Director in addition to her work as Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery. Warren left UCR/CMP in 1984, but as Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery she has maintained a close relationship with this institution. In addition to Walling and Warren, in the early 1980s, UCR/CMP staff also included archivist Chris J. Kenney, a part-time registrar and a part-time preparator.
In 1982, Edward W. Earle was hired as the museum's first full-time curator. Formerly of Boston's Photographic Resource Center, Earle came to UCR/CMP to curate the Keystone-Mast Collection. In August 1983, Earle was renamed Chief Curator and given the task of overseeing the museum's growing curatorial programs and staff; later, Earle became Senior Curator, and then Associate Director for Collections and New Media Projects. During his tenure at UCR/CMP, Earle became the museum's chief proponent of new imaging technologies. His interest in digital art and his prescient understanding of the possibilities offered by the Internet shaped the museum's current project to extend its exhibitions, collections, research and education to the World Wide Web. Earle left UCR/CMP in 1997 to become Director of Collections at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Recently, Earle became Curator of Digital Media at the International Center of Photography in New York. Dan Meinwald joined the UCR/CMP staff in 1983 as Registrar/Curator; Meinwald also worked as editor of the CMP Bulletin. A well-known New York based critic and historian of photography, Meinwald's experience as an intern at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and wide knowledge of emerging visual imaging technologies, was invaluable to the development of the museum's programming. After leaving the museum, Meinwald earned a Ph.D. in Art History; today, Dr. Meinwald is a professional consultant and manages his own company, Sound Advice.
In 1985, Concha Rivera, the widow of former UCR Chancellor Tomas Rivera became the museum's Director of Development. Well known in local and state-wide political and art circles, Rivera brought to the museum wide knowledge of arts fundraising and was a critical force in gathering together the group of donors whose support of the late 1980s capital campaign made the downtown museum facility a reality. Cathleen Walling explains, "Concha Rivera greatly expanded the museum's public visibility within the local community, making the museum an important cultural attraction for Riverside." Upon her retirement in 1993, Rivera was honored by the University with a gala reception, and at UCR/CMP with a more intimate dinner. She is remembered to this day as a warm, gracious and effective presence at the museum.
Also in 1985, Deborah Klochko began as the museum's Director of Education. Klochko came to the museum with a Master's Degree in Museum Education from George Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Visual Studies Workshop. Klochko founded the museum's docent program, wrote gallery notes, developed the museum's first educational community outreach programs, and prepared the grant to the National Endowment for the Arts that resulted in the highly successful VidKids Media Literacy Project. In addition to her work as an educator, Klochko also curated nearly a dozen exhibitions. Klochko left UCR/CMP in 1992; today, she is Director of the Friends of Photography at the Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco.
In 1985 and 1986, long-time museum benefactor Mead Kibbey donated his comprehensive collection of Zeiss Ikon cameras and equipment to UCR/CMP. Dan Meinwald, noted in his introduction to the CMP Bulletin, Products of Vision: The Zeiss Ikon Company and Its Cameras, "The collection is extraordinary, not only because it represents the camera production of the Zeiss company so well, but because the company's camera production was itself so remarkable" Characterized by a high degree of mechanical quality, over the years the company produced hundreds of cameras of wide design. Meinwald found that the only company to surpass Zeiss in scale was Eastman Kodak. Kibbey's gift to the museum tripled in size the museum's holdings in the technology of photography.
Also in 1985 and 1986, Sheryl Conkelton led the University Survey of Photographic Resources, a UCR/CMP project funded by the Office of the President of the University of California. As Director, Conkelton complied an inventory of the photography holdings throughout the UC system. Participation was solicited from all types of collections: academic, administrative departments, research and study collections and general and special interest collections. Conkelton's efforts resulted in the publication, the Directory of Photographic Collections.
In 1987, the museum's current Curator of Exhibitions joined the staff. Kevin Jon Boyle came to the museum as Exhibition Designer. In that capacity, Boyle was charged with conceptualizing and designing the museum's permanent and temporary exhibitions. Later, after the museum moved to its current downtown location, Boyle took on increased responsibility as gallery space increased fivefold from 2000 square feet to 10,000. Over the years, Boyle's innovative designs for the museum's permanent collections gallery and family Interactive gallery, as well as his imaginative presentations of changing exhibitions, have brought UCR/CMP widespread critical attention in addition to public interest.
Mid-1980s exhibitions reflected the museum's continuing commitment to understanding photography as fine art, social history and technology. Through shows on Innovations in the History of the Camera and the Evolution of the Japanese Camera; explorations of work by Wynn Bullock, Minor White, Luis Carlos Bernal, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen; and focused studies of Futurism and Photography, Fotografie aus Berlin and Carte de Visite portraiture, UCR/CMP demonstrated its far-ranging interest in elucidating contemporary and historical concerns in visual culture. Throughout much of the 1980s, the museum mounted an annual Photographers' Holiday Greeting Card Show inviting photographers to submit photography holiday greeting cards to be placed on display each December. This popular event lives on in slightly different form in UCR/CMP's December Holiday programming for First Sundays. By the middle of the decade, the museum's growth in size made it increasingly clear that UCR/CMP needed to find larger facilitates. Museum Director Charles Desmarais initiated the idea for a new building, its conceptual structure and fundraising strategies. In 1986, the University of California, Riverside reached an agreement with the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Riverside to purchase the former Kress store building in Downtown Riverside to be UCR/CMP's new home. A major capital campaign was begun to finance the renovation of the building and the relocation of the museum's collections. Prominent business and community leaders including Tony Culver, Don Dye, Tim Hayes, Jacques Yeager and Henry Coil led the effort.
In 1988, renovation began on the Kress building. Highly aware that museum's new facility would be of tremendous significance to future programming and exhibitions, Desmarais insisted upon a major architect. Internationally known architect Stanley Saitowitz was selected to redesign the facility; the former variety store was transformed into a metaphor of the camera. Saitowitz's designs for a third-floor, walk-in camera obscura built into the building's outer facade; dark rubber floors; and exposed air ducts produced an environment in which the people inside could be understood as the camera's film, absorbing light and information, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the museum experience. Acting as the primary client representative, Desmarais worked closely with Saitowitz ensuring that Saitowitz's designs were made a reality.
In 1988, director Charles Desmarais left his position to become director of the Laguna Art Museum leaving behind a legacy of innovative programming and exhibitions, an internationally known publication and a standard of excellence. Today, he is Director of Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. In his absence, Director of Development Concha Rivera stepped in as Acting Director while Edward Earle and Kevin Jon Boyle acted as museum overseers of the renovation of the Kress facility. In 1989, Roy McJunkin joined UCR/CMP as Collections Manager, later Curator of Collections. Formerly curator at the California Historical Society, McJunkin became acquainted with UCR/CMP while a graduate student in UCR's Program for Historic Resources Management. McJunkin brought to UCR/CMP his enthusiasm for photography history and commitment to encouraging student inquiry. Cathleen Walling notes that "Roy planned and managed the huge job of moving the 300,000-plus items contained in the museum's collections from Watkins House to Downtown." Steve Thomas, the current Curator of Collections explains that, among other things, McJunkin was largely responsible for ensuring that the museum's darkroom was a top notch facility. While at UCR/CMP, McJunkin wrote three major grants: a conservation survey to the Institute of Museum Services, a conservation project for the museum's Watkins Screen to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the digital Visual Cataloging of California Research Resources project to the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. Today, through these grant projects McJunkin's thoughtful consideration of UCR/CMP's collections continues to be felt despite his untimely death in 1993. His legacy also lives on in the form of an annual Student Internship Award.
The capital campaign for the museum was completed in 1989; $2.5 million was raised to relocate the museum to its new downtown facility. During the summer of that year, dozens of volunteers worked with staff members to pack the museum's collections. On the weekend of June 24, UCR/CMP hosted a camera packing party; nearly 30 volunteers inventoried, bagged, labeled and boxed the Bingham Collection of cameras and viewing devices. Many long-time museum supporters including Dr. and Mrs. Robert Bingham, friends from the Western Photographic Collectors Association, museum docents and AARP veterans from the Keystone-Mast resleeving project worked around the clock.
In the closing years of the decade, as a result of the planned move to the new facility, UCR/CMP greatly reduced its exhibition schedule. Indeed, in 1988, for the first time since 1981, the museum closed for the summer. Notwithstanding, in 1988 and 1989, UCR/CMP still provided the public with outstanding shows including Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Albert RengerPatzsch: Three Masters and the touring exhibition Bourke-White: A Retrospective, organized by the International Center of Photography, New York.
On June 5, 1989, UCR/CMP closed its galleries until April 7, 1990, in preparation for an Eye-Opening Year. During that period the museum completed its search for a new director. Jonathan Green, the founding director of the Wexner Art Center joined UCR/CMP and began initiating a new series of exhibitions designed to attract a fine art audience and engender community response to issues of concern to contemporary culture. Hired as both Director and Professor of Art and Art History, Green brought to the museum a distinguished record as a scholar and an innovative curator, a perfect fit for a museum still exploring photography as Revolution in a Box.
[edit] 1990’s
Nineteen hundred and ninety marked the beginning of a new era for UCR/California Museum of Photography. The museum opened the doors of its downtown facility in April with the permanent collections exhibition, Images and Apparatus: Photography in Context. This exhibition of selections from the museum's collections demonstrated photography's role in art, science, exploration, medicine, entertainment and other cultural arenas; it additionally featured an overview of photographic technology from its precursors to its prototypes to its contemporary forms. Whereas Images and Apparatus offered audiences insight into photography as a cultural history, and served to some degree as a reappraisal of the museum's first exhibition, Revolution in a Box, the museum's summer exhibition signaled UCR/CMP's emerging commitment to examine experimentation within photography. In August, 1990 the museum opened Biennial I, offering a survey of contemporary fine art photography as well as multi-media pieces and installations by nineteen California artists. Challenging, insightful and provocative, the Biennial presented art engaged with ideas of importance to postmodernism, feminism, environmental politics, legal reasoning, antiracism, mass culture, semiotics, and similar fields of inquiry. Other exhibitions that year featured work by artist Mike Mandel inspired by the Time/Motion studies of the famed efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth; recent images by American Women Artists including Linda Connor, Mary Ellen Mark and Olivia Parker; photographs by Lejaren á Hiller; and a group show, Polemical Landscapes by artists Deborah Bright, David T. Hanson, Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison, Peter Goin, Joe Deal and Allan Sekula. The museum also opened, with the help of Riverside's Junior League, a family Interactive Gallery offering hands-on activity stations for teaching patrons young and old about photographic technology.
But the museum's changing direction was undoubtedly most clearly signaled by the appointment of its new director, Jonathan Green. Announced that summer by Brian Copenhaver, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Green's appointment as UCR/CMP's third director was made in combination with a joint appointment as Professor of Studio Art and Art History. The author of three major books, many articles and an associate editor of Aperture Quarterly from 1974 to 1976, Green brought to UCR/CMP over 25 years of experience as a scholar, gallery curator and director. His book American Photography: A Critical History (1984, reprinted 1996) had been selected as the Nikon Book of the Year, 1984, and received the Benjamin Citation from the American Photographic Historical Society in recognition of achievement in photographic history. His other publications included Camera Work: A Critical Anthology (1973), The Snapshot (1974) and, with photographer Minor White, Celebrations (1974).
In addition to his reputation as a curator and scholar, Green also brought to the museum his reputation as an artist. Green's photographs had been collected by museums around the world including the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as well as included in the volume, American Images: New Work by 20 Contemporary Photographers, 1979. In 1979, Green had been awarded an NEA Photographer's Fellowship and in 1978, a Bell System (AT&T) Photographer's Fellowship. Perhaps most significantly to the future of UCR/CMP, Green additionally brought to the museum his extensive experience working in new visual technologies. At MIT, Green had been co-founder of the Media Lab's Visible Language Workshop, and at Ohio State University, Founding Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts. In 1984, while at the Wexner, Green articulated the need for museums to "insistently demonstrate that especially in the work of the last century-the traditional distinction between the visual arts territories has broken down." More specifically, "the lines between the traditional fine arts the visual arts, literature, music, dance and theatre are narrowing. Much of the most powerful contemporary work stems from the integration and intermeshing of these traditionally separate forms. It might even be argued that at present the visual arts have moved beyond these fine arts boundaries and are willing to consider the meaningfulness of all visual phenomena." Six years later, Green's perception of the growing syncretism in the fine arts informed his plans for UCR/CMP's future. For the AugustSeptember, 1990 edition of CMP News, Green wrote of his desire to implement programs that would serve to "expand the definition of photographic activity." For Green the museum's long held and dual interests in photographic art and visual technology were a foundation on which to build programs for exploring "video art, film, computer generated images, performance art, electronically generated imagery and other expressions that utilize photographic images and processes." UCR/CMP's collections of fine art, historical images, snap shots, stereographs, cameras and viewing devices offered the material basis upon which to explore contemporary artistic expression and social and political issues.
The Fall, 1990 exhibition, The Emperor's New Clothes: Sexuality, Photography and the Body Politic, a multi-media installation by artist Richard Bolton was a clear demonstration of the museum's new direction. Presented earlier that year at Photographic Resource Center in Boston, The Emperor's New Clothes offered audiences a "visual essay" that interrogated "the categories by which we understand images of sexuality." Bolton sought to question "the reasons that lead us to classify an image as Art? Fashion? Pornography?" To that end Bolton assembled an installation of images of sexuality from art, fashion and self-labeled pornographic books and magazines accompanied by his own analysis of the censorship debates that preoccupied the late 1980s and 1990, a history of censorship in the United States over the past decade, and the famous story by Hans Christian Anderson. Prior to the exhibition, Bolton sought responses to the exhibition's visual components from artists, curators, lesbian and gay activists, religious and conservative activists and constitutional law scholars as means to ensure public participation at the local and national levels. Additionally, the exhibition itself invited immediate responses from the public in the form of a comments wall. Greeted with limited protest in Riverside, Bolton's exhibition drew record numbers of visitors to the museum and introduced a new era of provocative, topical and challenging exhibition programming. That same Fall the museum presented Memento Mori: Death in Nineteenth Century Photography, an exploration of photographic depictions of death and mourning in the Victorian era guest curated by Dan Meinwald, the museum's former Curator of Collections. Combining works from the museum's collections with works borrowed from the Library of Congress, International Museum of Photography, Smithsonian Institution, Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and Strong Museum as well as private collections and archives the exhibition put on display images commonly found in nineteenth century people's homes including postmortem photographs, views of cemeteries and funerary memorabilia. Also on display were photographs purported to be of spirits. For Edward Earle, then the museum's senior curator, the exhibition not only touched upon all of human experience, but also provided "a powerful demonstration of the manner in which photography has entered the emotional life of generations of people."
Disquieting, unsettling, and unusual, Memento Mori, like Emperor's New Clothes, spoke not only to the emotional intensity of photography, but also to the cultural and historical specificity of images. In Memento Mori viewers found images that while disturbing to late twentieth century sensibilities had once offered solace to nineteenth century viewers. In Emperor's New Clothes, viewers were confronted with imagery that demonstrated a continuum between mass culture advertising and pornography. In combination, the Fall exhibitions testified to the complexity, variety and mutability of photographic meaning and expression in addition to demonstrating the necessity of bringing to photography knowledge of politics, history and culture. Green's imprint upon the museum was immediate and considerable. It was also forward looking. Foreseeing the growing significance of computer-generated graphic imaging and related visual technologies, Green quickly positioned UCR/CMP as an institution ready for a future that would include the World Wide Web, CD ROM art and digital photography.
In 1990, as the nation grappled with what came to be called the "culture wars," as the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire and as a climate increasingly hostile to the rich diversity of free inquiry formed, UCR/CMP's role as a cultural institution was irrevocably altered. Since 1973, UCR/CMP had offered visitors insight into visual expression through photography; in 1990, with two provocative exhibitions, UCR/CMP claimed its role as an institution prepared to demonstrate in Green's words the reality that, "Art's profound power to offend and infuriate also suggests its profound ability to question and clarify. Art, the quintessential human activity, often involves risks and frequently challenges the status quo. But most of all, art has the possibility to provide precisely . . . insight, integrity, sensitivity and redemption."
[edit] Collections Overview
The collections of UCR/CMP form the largest, most comprehensive holding of any photographic collection west of the Mississippi. The significance of the collections is measured by its encyclopedic nature. The growing UCR/CMP collections encompass every aspect of photographic arts, history, and technology. They are organized as four interlinked main tier collections. The collection is readily accessible by appointment to all researchers who express a legitimate need.
[edit] 1. The Bingham Technology Collection
The Bingham Technology Collection has grown from the original gift of 2,000 vintage cameras donated by Dr. Robert Bingham in 1973 to a current count of 10,000 cameras, viewing devices, and photographic apparatus. In 1975, Popular Photography declared that UCR’s Bingham Camera Collection was second only to the George Eastman House Collection in Rochester, New York, and the collection of the Smithsonian Institute.
The collection holds four synoptic subsets of camera technology: The Kibbey Zeiss-Ikon Collection; Curtis Polaroid Collection; Wodinsky Ihagee-Exacta Collection and the Teague Kodak Brownie Collection. Other significant artifacts include a Lewis daguerrean camera, a Simon Wing multi-lens wet-plate camera, a fully functioning Caille Brothers Cail-O-Scope, and a Ponti megalethoscope. As the most complete and actively used camera collection in the western states, this resource is highly valued by photography scholars, other museums, film/video producers, book/magazine publishers, regional schools, and photo clubs.
UCR/CMP has digitized representative examples from:
Teague Kodak Brownie Collection
Through the support of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts, UCR/CMP is actively committed to the continued digitization objects from the Bingham Technology Collection.
[edit] 2. The University Print Collection
The University Print Collection was founded in 1979 when several community patrons purchased a remarkable collection of photographic master prints from The Friends of Photography. Currently, the collection exceeds 20,000 images that were created by over 1,000 photographers. The museum cares for vintage works by such artists as Ansel Adams, Yolanda Andrade, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, Walker Evans, Francis Frith, Danny Lyon, Barbara Morgan, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Carleton Watkins. Some of the other artists represented in this collection are: Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, Larry Clark, Linda Conner, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Flor Garduño, Philipe Halsman, Lewis Hine, Gertrude Kasebier, Kusakabe Kimbei, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Pedro Meyer, Olivia Parker, Herb Quick, Holly Roberts and Garry Winogrand. Several negative archives include 7,000 by Ansel Adams from the Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection and 15,000 negatives by Los Angeles photographer, teacher and critic Will Connell. University Print Collection is complemented with: quantities of vintage daguerreotypes, 1840's calotype negatives, Civil War era ambrotypes, and commercial tintypes as well as images from popular culture (1840's to present).
A major subset of the University Print Collection is the Keystone-Mast Collection, which is comprised of over 250,000 original stereoscopic negatives and 100,000 paper prints. The original glass and film negatives form a vital primary record of worldwide social, cultural, industrial, agricultural historicity between 1860 and 1950. Viewable as three-dimensional imagery, Keystone-Mast photos represent a critical version of virtual reality. Research users include academic scholars, museum curators, textbook and commercial publishers, electronic media producers, curriculum writers, artists, filmmakers, and historic archivists.
The visual online catalogs of the Keystone-Mast Collection have been available on UCR/CMP website since 2001. There are currently 33,086 Keystone-Mast paper prints, with views of both the front and backs of the object, served online <http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/mainFrame/collections/guides/kmast/>. A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Preservation and Access Grant primarily funded these online catalogs.
Additional funding, by Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), supports the MOAC project to create catalogs served on the University of California’s California Digital Library < http://www.cdlib.org/>.
[edit] 3. UCR/CMP Study Center Library
UCR/CMP Study Center Library and Roy McJunkin Imaging Center are interlinked research areas containing 10,000 photography monographs, manuscript materials, artists books, technical literature, exhibition catalogs, salon annuals and runs of photography periodicals, a copy stand, plus a full compliment of expanding computer technology. International scholars, the education communities, and the museum staff utilize these research areas.
[edit] 4. The Media Reference Collection
The Media Reference Collection is made up of digital/virtual and media-based technology in the museum’s collection. Through its newly redeveloped website, UCR/CMP provides the world-audience with ongoing Internet exhibitions, annotated topical imagery, museum information and artist's works <http://www.cmp.ucr.edu>. Since 1994 when the Museum first went online, UCR/CMP has added over 13,000 pages of content that include over 400 themed micro-sites and 9 major finding aids. Ongoing grants and initiatives have enabled the museum to continue work on the website and allowed for continued digitization of artifacts found in the museums collections. To date we have digitized over 40,000 single artifacts, many of which have multiple views available. In addition to the web-based collection, the Media Reference Collection also includes over 2,000 software titles and 100 computers. These holdings would enable UCR/CMP to be able to access files and programs made at virtually any point in the digital age.
UCR/CMP strives to collect, interpret and protect photography as an artistic endeavor, as technologic innovation, and as social history. Additionally, because photography is so much a part of the history and livelihood of the West, particularly Southern California, the museum feels its collections have added pertinence. As the caretaker of one of the largest photographic collection in the United States, it is UCR/CMP's goal to preserve this significant resource for future generations.
