Visura Blog

    
Location: Brooklyn
Biography: The Visura (Vē-su-ra: Be seen) Blog features Visura highlights, essays, and announcements including grants, partnerships, events, and open call opportunities and results.
Events
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Cruel Radiance: Photography, 1940s–1960s
visura blog
Apr 12, 2022
Cruel Radiance: Photography, 1940s–1960s focuses on extraordinary recent gifts to The Met—especially those made in celebration of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. 

The show explores the flourishing of photography as a medium between World War II and the Vietnam War and includes several mini-monographic presentations on a group of diverse photographers including Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, Mario De Biasi, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Don McCullin, and Aaron Rose. 

The exhibition features classic photographs seldom seen, acquisitions that the Museum has not yet exhibited, and magazines and books by Japanese photographers—also notable gifts to The Met and works of art in their own right. The show’s title is borrowed from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s collaborative depression-era masterpiece published in 1941. Agee writes about what he believed was Evans’s (and photography’s) greatest achievement and challenge: “all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined … to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.”

The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago (detail), 1946. Gelatin silver print, 6 1/4 x 5 3/16 in. (15.9 x 13.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990 (1990.1045). © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


LinkedIn Icon Facebook Icon Twitter Icon
5,596

Also by Visura Blog —

Spotlight

Visura: Rashod Taylor on Documenting the Intimate Realities of Family, Legacy, and the Lens

Cameron Peters for Visura
Featured Film Videos

Video: Johanna Alarcón on the power of Photography

Directed by Adriana Teresa Letorney for Visura
Featured Film News Reframe Videos

VIDEO: Sara Hylton on the importance of stories that capture strength, resilience and beauty

The Visura Media Blog
Events

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY PRESENTS SAUL LEITER: CENTENNIAL

Visura Blog
Events News

SFMOMA: Sea Change: Photographs from the Collection

Visura Blog
Events

Whitney Museum of American Art presents Trust Me

Visura Blog
Events News

The Colombus Museum of Art presents Arbus • Sherman • Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s

Visura Blog
Events News

11th annual New York Portfolio Review

Visura Blog
Events News

The Brooklyn Museum Presents María Magdalena Campos - Pons: Behold , the Artist’s First Museum Survey in New York

Visura Blog
Events News

TATE MODERN: A celebration of the varied landscape of contemporary African photography today

Visura Blog
Media

Visura interviews photographer Thong Vo

Kisha Ravi for Visura
Events News

Eastman Museum Presents Gillian Laub's Southern Rites

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

40th Annual ICP Infinity Awards Benefit Gala to be Held April 10 in New York City

Visura Blog
Events News

New Mexico Museum of Art presents— Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Books Featured Film

Delpire & Co presents Karla Voleau's new book

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Gagosian presents Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends

Visura Blog
Events News

MoMA Presents: ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events

The Contemporary Jewish Museum Presents— RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) presents Beautiful Forms: Queer Art Unbound festival

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Smithsonian American Art Museum presents Carrie Mae Weems: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Peabody Essex Museum presents As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) exhibits Cy Twombly's work

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events

Art Gallery of Ontario Presents a Re-Imagination of African Studio Portraiture

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Fox Talbot Museum presents Light Struck by Ellen Carey

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Cruel Radiance: Photography, 1940s–1960s by Visura Blog
Sign-up for
For more access