August 2, 2025–January 25, 2026 The collection of Ken and Jacki Widder, prominent researchers and business leaders in biotechnology who […]
August 2, 2025–January 25, 2026
The collection of Ken and Jacki Widder, prominent researchers and business leaders in biotechnology who have donated significant holdings of photographs to The San Diego Museum of Art, resembles a microcosm of the major crosscurrents in mid-twentieth-century photography in the United States. Its breadth is vast, ranging from portraiture and photojournalism to architectural views, motion studies, and photographs that verge on abstraction. Simultaneously, it is deep: the Widders have carefully collected certain artists extensively so as to illustrate the arcs of their careers. Thanks to the Widders’ generosity in sharing their collection with The San Diego Museum of Art, audiences gain the exciting opportunity to explore photography’s many facets and roles within modern culture, while also appreciating several preeminent photographers’ individual evolutions across different bodies of work.
Though the photographs are varied, certain unifying threads emerge that are explored in this exhibition’s three sections: representations of the urban environment, from observations of architecture to works that borrow the language of contemporary painting to flirt with abstraction; photographs produced for organizations and media outlets during the heyday of the illustrated press from the 1930s to the 1980s; and “environmental” portraits that picture their sitters in the flux of their surroundings rather than the studio. In ways that are sometimes overt and often subtle, these photographers have used their cameras to shift our normal perception and offer new ways of seeing.
Featured: Ray Metzker, 80 H-Y5, 1980. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Ken and Jacki Widder. © Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.
