Met Exhibition Explores Photography's Century-Long Cloud Challenge

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition,“Chasing Clouds,” traces the evolution of capturing clouds in photography from the early 1800s to 1929. This period, roughly photography's first century, addresses how images of clouds transitioned from a significant technical hurdle to a common visual element, despite their ubiquity today, as seen in iconic imagery like the 1996 Windows XP default background.

Early photographic processes were notably sensitive to blue light, often rendering skies as stark, overexposed white spaces. While this sometimes created an ethereal effect, exemplified by John Beasley Greene's“The Nile in Front of the Theban Hills” (1853–54), some photographers resorted to painting clouds into their landscape prints. A critical advancement came when French photographer Gustave Le Gray devised a method to combine two separate exposures, one for the sky and another for the land and sea, demonstrating that photographic manipulation has roots as deep as the medium itself.

The exhibition, which also includes Linnaeus Tripe's“Pugahm Myo: Distant View of Gauda-palen Pagoda” (1855), begins with painted cloud studies and concludes with photographic modernism. It highlights a dynamic interplay between artistic practice and technological development, rather than a linear scientific progression, presenting a more nuanced history of visual discovery.

Source: Hyperallergic

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