Photography in NMMoA's new exhibit reflects the eye of the beholder
Jan. 19—Caroline Burnett is sitting in an office with half-empty walls.
She's trying to describe what was there just days before and what visitors to the New Mexico Museum of Art will find when they explore the museum's new Ways of Seeing photographic exhibition.
Burnett, who began collecting decades ago with her late husband, William, says that if there's a theme to the work she treasures, it's the depiction of the beauty of humanity. In her case, it's mostly black-and-white photos, and it's mostly women radiating some kind of palpable emotion.
"They all bring me in," she says of the pieces she's collected. "They have some pensiveness or passion or some expression of their lives that speak to me."
Burnett has lived in Santa Fe since the early 1990s, and she is one of two local contributors to the exhibit, which aims to celebrate the individual tastes of individual collectors. Jamie Brunson, a Lamy-based artist and collector, is the other local contributor.
Other collectors are Don Moritz, who amassed a treasury of prints by El Rito-based photographer David Michael Kennedy, and W.M. Hunt, a New York-based curator who published The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture, 2011).
'WAYS OF SEEING'
* Opens Saturday, January 20, and runs through June 16
* Goodwin Gallery, New Mexico Museum of Art
* 107 W. Palace Avenue
* 505-476-5063; nmartmuseum.org
In that book, the subjects are captured either not looking at the camera or just without eyes, and the photographs he contributed for Ways of Seeing run along similar themes.
That's part of the charm of the exhibit, says curator Kate Ware. The art is similar to what you might find in someone's home, and that can be somewhat eclectic.
"Private collectors have a lot more flexibility and latitude in terms of what they acquire," says Ware of the Ways of Seeing collection, which will run at the New Mexico Museum of Art's Goodwin Gallery until June 16. "It's a lot of fun to see their distinctive personalities."
Brunson, who moved to New Mexico about nine years ago, says she did most of her collecting with her former husband, Mark Levy. Levy, who died in 2021, was an art professor, and Brunson is a painter who taught locally and showed her work at various galleries in the Bay Area. They both worked as critics for Art Week and spent their weekends visiting galleries and looking for pieces that moved them.
"For me, because I'm a painter, there's no mystery in painting," Brunson says. "I can look at a painting and go, 'OK, this was done with that material.' But photography was more like some kind of magic. It was more possible to focus less on technique and more on the narrative of the imagery. And Mark ... was very interested in old culture and religion. Buddhism. Shamanism. He actually wrote a book about the modern artist as shaman."
Together, they traveled to far-flung corners of the world, including India and Thailand. They visited Japan, where Brunson spent part of her childhood. Everywhere they went, they were attracted to old buildings and nature in the state of destruction.
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That's a prevailing theme in the work they collected. Brunson, a geometric abstractionist, speaks of one piece, a Richard Misrach photograph of a submerged gas station in the Salton Sea. Misrach is a pioneer in color photography, and in the image, she says, the art isn't just in the desert; it's in what humans left behind and nature took over.
There are similar themes in the rest of her collection. One piece, an Edward Burtynsky (a Canadian artist known for his industrial landscapes), shows a proud worker standing in front of the hollowed carcass of a ship. And in another she loves, by John Pfahl (an American landscape photographer), there's the dominance of smokestacks spewing industrial bile.
For every piece they bought, she says, there's a story.
"Sometimes we would agree together that something was special," Brunson says. "But sometimes, I would pay special attention to the work Mark responded to, and I would sneak back to the gallery to buy it as a birthday present or a holiday present. That was part of the accumulation process; the idea that it could be a lovely surprise or a gift."
The same is true for Burnett, who recalls that the first piece she ever bought with her husband was an Arnold Newman photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe. They started collecting photography in the late '90s to decorate their home. They collected classic work by Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. Burnett says she has a portfolio of nature photographer Eliot Porter that is in full color that she loves dearly, but when she stops and thinks about what moves her, it's often the starkness of black-and-white images.
In one photo from her collection, renowned photojournalist Tony O'Brien's untitled portrait of a young girl living in a refugee camp in Afghanistan, the subject resolutely stares back at the camera with a battle-worn visage. It's the poster for Ways of Seeing.
"It's a picture that brought me to tears the first time I saw it," Burnett says. "In my journey, photos have to have a passionate impact on me. I'm not saying I have to be brought to tears, but there are plenty of pieces I like that don't have that level of emotional draw to them for me. I don't buy just for the sake of buying art. With every piece, there's a reason I purchased it."
Another piece of hers appears as part of the Manuel Carrillo exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and over the last few years, she's had pieces on display in a number of other exhibitions. She says she found joy in collecting for herself and now relishes the opportunity to share it with the community.
When you're walking through the Ways of Seeing exhibit, Burnett says, she hopes visitors will consider not just the perspective of the artist but also of the people who treasured their art.
"I don't want to make it sound like an assignment," she says. "But I hope people will see this exhibit — mine and the other collectors' — and look at it through the lens of, 'Why is this part of someone's collection? Where is the beauty that might be seen?' Somebody saw this beauty, and they're sharing part of who they are by putting together this collection for this exhibition."
