History and culture: “A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” Exhibition in Washington

In Smithsonian American Art Museum in June 2013 will open “A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” Exhibition.

Approximately 130 photographs from the museum’s collection trace the evolution of photography in America from a purely documentary medium to a full-fledged artistic genre. The exhibition charts a particularly American preoccupation within the larger history of photography — the use of photographs as empirical evidence of the country’s economic, social, and cultural development. Photography not only captured the country’s changing cultural and physical landscape but also evolved into an art form possessing its own language and layers of meaning.

The photos, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and photo albums on view are organized around four major themes that defined American photographic character and culture:

- American Essentials provides a diverse catalogue of America’s people, landscape, architecture, and everyday objects.

- Spiritual Frontier examines the way in which our early idea of a sprawling, inexhaustible America has changed over time.

- America Inhabited traces America’s rapid industrialization and urbanization and examines our contemporary urban and suburban landscapes.

- Imagination at Work demonstrates how photography’s role of spontaneous witness gradually gave way to contrived arrangement and artistic invention.