Picture Perfect: Masterworks Of Photography From The Hochberg-Mattis Collection

GREENWICH — The major summer exhibition, “Picture Perfect: Masterworks of Photography from The Hochberg-Mattis Collection,” on view from June 11 through September 11 at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, features selections from one of the most comprehensive and important private collections of vintage photography in the United States.

The collection has been assembled by Michael Mattis and his wife Judith Hochberg, who readily concede that they have “an obsession/passion” for collecting photography. The couple began amassing works during their graduate school years in the early 1980s, prowling Butterfields auction house in San Francisco in the days when an Ansel Adams print cost a mere $500

Mr Mattis, until recently a particle physicist who worked for the government’s Los Alamos laboratory, and Ms Hochberg, a linguist and teacher, jokingly admit that their buying then went “completely out of control” as their collection grew to many thousands of prints.

The focus of the Mattis-Hochberg collection is “vintage” photography, in which the print quality (the picture making) is as important as the image (the picture taking).

Though the couple’s initial focus was 20th Century photography, the collection now covers photography from its inception in 1839 to approximately 1980. The exhibition includes rare — even unique — early work, such as the negative/positive pair of images from 1842 by William Henry Fox Talbot (the co-inventor of photography) of Sir David Brewster with Talbot’s microscope, as well as signature images and previously unseen masterpieces by world-renowned photographers.

Mr Mattis and Ms Hochberg have assembled one of the most valued collections of the work of Edward Weston and have recently published, from their holdings, the most sumptuously reproduced Weston monograph, titled Edward Weston: Life Work.

The exhibition also highlights 19th Century British photography by Hill and Adamson, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron; early French photography by Charles Negre, Charles Marville, Felix Nadar, Gustave Le Gray and Edouard-Denis Baldus; and early American photography by Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, John Hillers and Thomas Eakins.

There is outstanding 19th Century travel photography, including Robert MacPherson’s images of Rome and Captain Linneaus Tripe’s of India. There will also be a case of daguerreotypes, the first photographic technique, as well as a case of backlit negatives of many different types.

The Mattis-Hochberg collection is strong in the work of the American Photo-Secession, a group of pictorial photographers formed in 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz and championed in his magazine Camera Work (1903-1917) and at the “little galleries” of the Photo-Secession (1905-1917) at 291 Fifth Avenue.

The exhibition features work by Stieglitz, himself an expert photographer, as well as Photo-Secessionists Clarence White and Gertrude Kasebier.

Additional selections from the 20th Century include the f/64 photographers, including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. European Modernism is highlighted with the work of Andre Kertesz, Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Man Ray.

Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s will include Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others. There is a selection of photojournalism, including the iconic image by Alfred Eisenstadt of a couple ecstatically kissing in Times Square on VJ Day. Finally, an outstanding grouping of prints by Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe will round out the show.

The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, call 203-869-0376 or visit www.BruceMuseum.org.