Abstract photography

PHOTOGRAPHY OF MANY TYPES TO BE SHOWN AT MUSEUM "Abstraction in Photography," an exhibition of photographs organized by Edward Steichen, will be on view on the first floor of the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, from May 2 through July l*. Mr. Steichen, Director of the Museum's Department of Photography, has selected 150 photographs, both in color and black and white, by 75 photographers, to illustrate abstract images ranging from the scientific document to contrived arrangements and from mechanical pattern to organic design. The abstract phase exhibited as part of "In and Out of Focus," shewn at the Museum in 19^8, and in the "Color photography" exhibition in 1950, is expanded in this survey, in some cases utilizing later work by the same photographers. The present exhibition follows the Museum's Korean war exhibition, just terminated, with a definite intention of contrasting the reality of sensitive reportorial photography of the impact of war on human beings with the scientistts penetrating camera findings through microscope and telescope, coupled with a record of the work of photographers concerned with evolving another reality by probing into the realm of the abstract. The historical survey of abstract photography presented begins with Matthew Brady's famous photograph of the silhouette of Richmond's ruins in 1865 and then the chronophotography studies of Marey's made between l883~l886. Shadowgraph images by Coburn and an abstraction by Strand, published in 1917, shadowgraphs and montages by Schad, 1918, are followed by Man Ray "Rayograms," Moholy-Nagy "Photograms," Stieglitz "Equivalents" and prints by the Westons, Sheeler, Evans, Adams, Steiner, Tina Modotti, Steichen and others who produced abstractions in the 1920s.ions in the 1920s. In the recent work, which makes up most of this exhibition, there are numerous, purely scientific photographs with resulting incidental abstractionsj there are images by photographers interpreting scientific subjects; and there are photographs of a purely inventive intent and