Photography from the Bank of America Collection at IMMA

From February 22 to May 20, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin exhibits selected works from the art holdings of Bank of America, one of the largest and most comprehensive corporate collections of photography in the world.

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, an exhibition comprised of 100 works, is curated in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The works are arranged by theme: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, documentary images, street photography and experimental abstractions. They are grouped in this way in order “to create visual conversations between photographs exhibited side by side” – 19th-century works are juxtaposed with modern, the European aesthetic with the American, close-ups with distant views, staged subjects with documentary. Thus, the viewer witnesses the range and diversity of photography, and how photographers’ approaches have changed over time.

Many of the photographs in this thought-provoking exhibition are significant and rare. The influential curator, art historian and photographer Beaumont Newhall and his wife, photography critic Nancy Newhall, significantly influenced the collection from which these works have been selected. In the late 1960s, the pair assembled a core group of photographs for the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, a legacy Bank of America institution. These photographs covered the entire history of the medium.

Photographers represented in this exhibition include Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Tina Barney, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Vera Lutter, Vik Muniz, Richard Misrach, Stéphane Couturier and Alec Soth.

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection was originally curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has been reinterpreted by IMMA for a new exhibition. A full-colour publication to accompany the exhibition is available for purchase (€25). It offers insight into the history of the Bank of America’s collection and the evolution of photography.

To find out more about the Irish Museum of Modern Art, visit www.imma.ie.