VII Photo Agency

200 photographs capturing life’s milestones, from intimate moments to historic tragedies

Featuring work by Ron Haviv and Ed Kashi
Through September 25, 2011
Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale

Next Venue
October 22, 2011 to January 1, 2012
Art Museum of South Texas

A major exhibition of more than 200 works exploring the moments that shape our being, from intimate memories to historic tragedies. Renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz sets the tone with a preface comprised of images hand-picked from her archive to illustrate the exhibition’s seven thematic components: Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging, and Remembering.

The Art of Caring showcases several works from Time & LIFE Pictures, including recognizable classics by such legendary photographers as Alfred Eisenstaedt and W. Eugene Smith. Contemporary artists include other established photographers such as Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Chester Higgins, Sally Mann, Nicholas Nixon, Tatsumi Orimoto, Robert Polidori, Dona Schwartz, Neal Slavin and Larry Sultan. The exhibition features as well the work of emerging artists Elinor Carucci, Jeff Charbonneau, Eliza French, Peter Granser, Jessica Todd Harper and Misty Keasler.

Beginning at the conclusion of World War II, the slightly more than 60-year time span encompassed by the photographs in this exhibition allows the viewer to witness many of the great events that shaped the last half-century, as well as those that are shaping the new millennium. The stage was set during World War II for photography to take on an unprecedented role as chronicler, consciousness raiser and educator. Throughout the war, new magazines like Life, as well as Vu in France and the Picture Post in Britain, were credited with turning “documentary photographers into photojournalists and photojournalists like … W. Eugene Smith into heroes.”

After the World War II, photo-essays by photographers like Smith and Gordon Parks in Life were credited with helping to stoke “the ‘can-do’ energy of the times.” By the 1970s, many of the same established photo-journalists, whose images stirred a nation and world, saw their professional lives evolve from careers replete with opportunities to have work published in Life, Look and other magazines, to earning a livelihood from less constant sources upon the demise of these same publications. At the same time, the advent of color photography and its acceptance as a legitimate artistic medium closed the gap between fine art and commercial work in new ways.