ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION

Photography

During the early 1970s, the Rockford Art Association sought to expand its collection into fine art photography. The Radius exhibitions produced several purchase awards, but more importantly it brought the association into contact with Arnold Gilbert, collector and champion of photography as a fine art. The Gilbert Collection donated in 1974, 1976 and in 1991 forms the backbone of the more than 290 photographs in the collection. Today, Rockford Art Museum collects from the beginning of the process of photography to contemporary and experimental photographers. It holds a substantial collection of prints by Brett Weston and Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo.

Photographers in RAM Collection

Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams' photographs of the American western landscape have earned him a place as perhaps the most recognizable photographer of the 20th century. Often employing an 8” x 10” negative format with a highly controlled approach to printing, Adams' photographs seem to create a singular reality, one that embodies a vision that believed in the primacy of the natural world and the power that underlies it. more...

Manuel Carrillo
In post-revolutionary Mexico, Carrillo was interested in his fellow Mexicans and, in particular, the rural lower classes––street merchants, farmers, and women and children. There is an aesthetic that publications such as National Geographic attempt; yet these photographs are more than an artistically conceived documentation of an indigenous people. In these people, he saw a tribute to the universal human spirit. more...

Arnold Gilbert
Arnold Gilbert collected work by many of his close friends, informally hosted them in the home he and Temmie shared, and introduced them to each otheras was the case with Paul Schranz to photography legends VanDeren Coke, John Szarkowski, David Travis and Al Weber. "He brought people together from all walks of life," said Schranz. In turn, Weber introduced him to Manuel Carrillo, while Aaron Siskind Introduced Gilbert to fellow instructor Harry Callahan, as well as students Joseph Jachna, Ken Jacobson and Chuck Swedlund, all of whom became art educators themselves. more...

Misha Gordin
Although the power of manipulating photographs through double exposures, masking, montage, solarization and airbrushing by artists, dictators, spiritualists and the news media was exploited almost upon its invention, the idea of the photograph as a truthful recorder of places, events and circumstances remains largely ingrained. Misha Gordin represents one of the few, when digital manipulation still resided in unfound land, who used the photograph to create timeless landscapes inhabited by dreamlike figures, sometimes tormented, sometimes sensuous, often enigmatic, toiling in strange labors. more...

Joseph Jachna
Between the summers of 1969 and 1970, armed with only a wide angle camera lens, a host of optical lenses and mirrors and his own body, Joseph Jachna created series of photographs that broke traditional boundaries of what a landscape was supposed to be. In an era, before digital cameras and Photoshop, he radically manipulated and distorted what the camera recorded. more...

Yousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh was born in 1908 in Mardin, Armenia (now Turkey). At age 16, after suffering the horrors of the Armenian massacres by the Turks, he immigrated to Syria and then to Canada where he worked for his uncle's studio. He apprenticed with John Garo in Boston before returning to Canada and setting up his own studio. There he was discovered by Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who arranged for him to sittings of many prominent visiting dignitaries. Karsh gained international prominence with his portrait of Winston Churchill, which appeared on the cover of Life magazine in December 1941. more...

Brett Weston
Brett Weston first gained international recognition when his work was included in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, held in Stuttgart, Germany. There his photographs were shown alongside those of Edward Steichen, Bernice Abbott, Man Ray and his father, Edward Weston. He had begun photography 3 years earlier at the age of 15 as an apprentice to his father. more...