Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection

Contemporary photographs are tricky concoctions… Particularly today, in an ultramediated culture of tepid Facebook friendships and corporate propaganda and political spin and industrially manufactured foods, the desire to cut through the layers separating us from the real is more urgent than ever… Photography has no claim on the real and never did, except insofar as we insist, obstinately, that we see our version of the real in it. Photographs are imprints of the once-was, as malleable and symbolic as our own changing perceptions, dreams, and anxieties.
—Kevin Moore
Juxtaposing rare vintage prints by Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander with luscious color photographs by William Eggleston, Andreas Gursky, and Stephen Shore, this dynamic collection presents groundbreaking work by some of the preeminent artists of the past century. Celebrating photography’s fundamental fluidity and diversity, authors Kevin Moore and Julian Cox explore the preoccupation with everyday “reality,” excess, spectacle, and loss in pictures by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roe Ethridge, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Alec Soth, Jeff Wall, and many others.