Artist Inspiration

Sally Mann

The Memory of Time

Overview: The Memory of Time presents work by contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history. In the last two decades, as the world has undergone an unprecedented technological revolution, photography itself has changed profoundly. With the advent of the digital age, people around the world are recording every aspect of their lives through photography, sharing their pictures with friends and strangers online and through the burgeoning social media. Yet digital photography has not only changed the way people make and circulate photographs, it has also shattered enduring notions of the medium as a faithful witness and recorder of unbiased truths, for now everything in a photograph can be fabricated; nothing need be real. Photography — once understood as verifying specific facts, capturing singular moments of time, and preserving explicit memories — is now recognized to have a multifaceted and slippery relationship to the truth and to the past. By embracing this complexity, contemporary artists have placed photography at the center of a renewed discussion around the construction of history and memory and the perception of time.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: “Traces of History,” “Time Exposed,” “Memory and the Archive,” “Framing Time and Place,” and “Contemporary Ruins.” It features recently acquired works made from the early 1990s to the present by artists who explore these concepts.

Articles: How Do You Photograph a Memory?

Memory of Time Exhibition List

Sally Mann

Reading from “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs” by Sally Mann

Sally Mann, artist. In this presentation recorded on June 21, 2015, at the National Gallery of Art, acclaimed photographer Sally Mann reads from her revealing memoir and family history, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are described as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." Mann crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel, but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

Yet, the color of the girls’ skin belies such a history, even as their beauty and knowing expressions—especially the authoritative look of the central figure—challenge viewers to question why they have been excluded for so long. Further complicating and enriching the work, Weems glazed it with a piece of convex glass of the type commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century mirrors, as if to suggest that the image represents a reflection of the world at large.

May Flowers is the first work by Weems, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, to enter the collection of the National Gallery of Art. It was acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund. Like other recent additions to the collection from artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, and Byron Kim, it is a powerful statement on the role of race in American society.

Deboarh Luster

Archive of Lamentations

Deborah Luster, artist. In 1990, the National Gallery of Art launched an initiative to acquire the finest examples of the art of photography and to mount photography exhibitions of the highest quality, accompanied by scholarly publications and programs. In the years since, the Gallery’s collection of photographs has grown to nearly 15,000 works encompassing the history of the medium, from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, featuring in-depth holdings of work by many masters of the art form. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of this initiative, the Gallery presents the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund. On view from May 3 through September 13, 2015, The Memory of Timeexplores the work of 26 contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history. For more than 20 years, artist Deborah Luster has been engaged in an ongoing investigation of violence and its consequences. In this lecture held on the exhibition’s closing day, Luster discusses the evolution of her work from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana and Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, as well as her current project at Louisiana’s Angola Prison.

Mark Ruwedel

Mark Ruwedel (American, b. 1954) is a photographer who examines the interaction between society and the landscape of the western United States, creating works that are in his words “about the interrogation of human values, not only about beauty or geology.” Active as a professional photographer since the 1970s, Ruwedel has often focused on nature’s reclamation of land over time, as in the series Westward the Course of Empire (1994–2007), in which he turned his lens to the faint traces of the railroad lines that once snaked through the West. His photographs capture the dramatic cuts through landmasses, scattered remains of trestles, and the lingering imprint of the long-forsaken tracks in the subtle grade of the terrain. Ruwedel’s more recent series Dusk (2007–2010), a study of derelict houses in the California desert, similarly addresses the relationship between natural and built environments. In these projects and others Ruwedel examines the landscape not to marvel at its splendor, but rather to better understand how history is written into its topography.

Sophe Calle

Kara Walker

In Walker’s version, the demeaning postures and exaggerated features of her figures call attention to negative stereotypes of African Americans often found in minstrel shows, novels, and art of the 19th and early 20th centuries and reveal the corrosive power of stereotypes and prejudice.