About Face: Intimacy and Abstraction in Photographic Portraits

This exhibition considers the voyeuristic intimacy of the close-up portrait in thirteen photographs by celebrated photographers Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Gutmann, Barbara Morgan, and Edward Weston. Dating from the 1920s to the early 1940s, each striking photograph captures a likeness and the mood set by the subject’s personality. Taken in close proximity or cropped in the darkroom, they present their subjects in great detail but also allow passages of abstraction to emerge from the clean geometry of the compositions.

This exhibition is organized by the Cantor Arts Center. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Mark and Betsy Gates Fund for Photography.