Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection
by Kevin Moore and Julian Cox
de Young Museum, San Francisco
June 16 to September 16, 2012
Panel Discussion
June 8, 2012
de Young Museum, San Francisco
Drawing upon the dynamic collection of San Francisco native Trevor Traina, this exhibition consists of approximately 100 works made by some of the pre-eminent artists working in photography this past century. While the core of the Traina collection embraces the documentary impulse in photography, it also tracks the medium’s full-blooded absorption into the world of contemporary art. Mixing rare black-and-white vintage prints of canonical images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, with luscious, eye-popping work in color by artists ranging from Stephen Shore and William Eggleston to Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, this exhibition celebrates photography’s fundamental richness and plasticity. Photography’s use in conceptual art has been at the center of Traina’s most recent activity as a collector, which brings the exhibition fully into the contemporary moment with exciting new work by artists such as Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams and Roe Ethridge.