Hidden Treasures at Fogg

Going to a museum, one comes across greatness where it is least expected; this time its true in terms of both location and content.

Through the courtyard and tucked in the back of the Fogg museum is the Strauss Gallery, which is currently featuring “A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection,” showcasing a collection in three parts of photographs amassed and until now collecting dust like most of the university’s gathering in a Harvard depository.

Hidden from tourists and casual museum-goers only interested in the celebrity of Van Gogh’s self-portrait and the Bernini sketch collection, the photography is surprisingly compelling, with emotionally raw prints that compose a time capsule of social changes and events of the 20th century.

Portraits of children cringing at their first haircut, tuxedo-clad men diving head first into a fountain, an elderly couple standing by their piano and women gathered at a ball evoke a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of unknown people in the “American Professional Photographers Collection.”

Older prints from Barger Studio, Bachrach Studio and Joe Steinmetz’s series on middle-class life archive leisure in unflattering and often awkward photos that are both amusing and relatable, like the best reality TV.

News media meets still photography in the “Fine Art Photographers Collection” on the back wall of the gallery. It creates a crescendo across the wall of color and technical advancements in print-making but it is too wide to really incite appreciation as a grouping of photographs.

Bookended by William Henry Jackson’s 1890 photograph, “Canon of Grand River, Utah” and Alex Webb’s contemporary color photograph “Guard at Sugar Plantation, Outside Kampala Uganda,” the collection spotlights more historical subjects such as political campaigning in 1956.

The collection is certainly interesting from a photographical and technical perspective, but out of the three sections evokes the least emotional response to the prints. Without a more academic appreciation for photography, the pictures in this section seem oddly juxtaposed, bland and flat. Webb’s photograph in Uganda is one of the most pleasing, yet seems strangely out of place as one of two international photographs and one of just a few color photographs in the entire gallery.

The most emotionally unsettling section is the “Social Museum Collection,” highlighting societal ills and poor conditions of industrial and social life. Orphanages full of sick children, hospitals and women portrayed as victims of domesticity crowd the walls, the display of the prints diminishing the gravity of their content. However, the attention paid to old social settlements of East Coast cities like Boston and the amateur but vivid documenting of those living conditions rescues this section from being yet another cliché collection of society’s flaws.

The gallery as a whole is an interesting yet confusing sample of the depository’s collection and it is questionable why those three categories were chose to represent over twenty-eight thousand works.

The space itself is problematic in displaying the photographs because they are so varied but so closely packed together in such a geometric design. As a result the effects of the prints blend together to a much lesser cumulative effect.

Displayed on their own, the sub-collections would come closer to achieving a successful historical investigation of society through photography. Taken together they weave a telescopic but diluted collage of modern society.

The exhibit “A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection” will be on display at the Fogg until October 30.

—Staff writer Bari M. Schwartz can be reached at bschwar@fas.harvard.edu