In Dialogue is an on-going series of installations that explores relationships between historical paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and modern and contemporary photographs.
Through compelling and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions, works drawn from across the Museum’s collection reveal surprising connections and invite visitors to engage with diverse perspectives.
Often beginning from a point of visual symmetry, the accompanying wall texts examine how key themes have been reimagined over time. As an on-going series of conversations, In Dialogue invites us to rethink traditional readings of historic works in order to focus on ideas that continue to resonate with contemporary audiences.
The first iteration of In Dialogue, which began on November 13th, places photographs made during the last 50 years by five women from Japan, Mexico, and the United States in conversation with European artworks created before 1900, predominantly by men.
Works by Diane Arbus, Daniela Rossell, Chris Enos, Asako Narahashi, and Deana Lawson are featured in the first rotation. This multi-gallery installation explores new resonances amid such recurrent themes as mortality, class, and the natural world, reframing how we interpret objects made centuries ago.
Staging Family, 1766/2008
American photographer Deana Lawson’s portrait of a family gathered in their living room at Christmastime, the youngest son grinning at something beyond the frame, recalls the casual yet intimate nature of a family snapshot. But Coulson Family is carefully choreographed: as in many of her portraits, Lawson used props and posed her sitters in an effort to, as she says, “insert my singular dream vision within something that’s very real.”
In this way, the photograph resonates with German painter Johann Zoffany’s depiction of an aristocratic household in John, Fourteenth Lord Willoughby de Broke, and His Family. Both scenes are staged visions of domestic life, in which the minute details of interior spaces and family dynamics are meticulously arranged.
Perspectives of Nature
Two photographs by Asako Narahashi, from her series half awake and half asleep in the water (2001–08), are installed in close proximity to two landscapes by 18th-century painter Claude-Joseph Vernet.
While standing or swimming in lakes in her native Japan, Narahashi held her camera half-submerged in the water. Without looking through the viewfinder, she pointed her lens toward the coastline, timing each exposure to coincide with the swells of the tide. Her disorienting, faraway views of the shore reverse the approach to the natural world displayed in Vernet’s nearby canvases, which evoke the force of the sea from solid ground.
The first iteration of In Dialogue is currently on view in the Getty Museum’s North, East, and South Pavilions until February 12, 2022.
