A New Collection Of The Art Of Photography

A New Collection of the Art of Photography

IT is always remarkable whenever a new collection of the Art of Photography is inaugurated. And when a bank of national stature initiates the program, we nod our heads in cheerful amazement and clap our hands in applause.

Seeking help in its venture into a new field, the Exchange National Bank of Chicago turned to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. The mutual interchange grew wondrously well for everyone concerned. Nancy, with Beaumont’s help, gathered a remarkable array of photographs. It is classic. The result is an unimpeachable core for future additions. The collection was first shown in the public room of the Bank. For the catalogue, the Newhalls have written tight biographies that read like an extension of their book, Masters of Photography, long out of print.

The collection is already an affirmation of that form of photography which affects us as do other examples of art. But with a difference, a difference that grows out of the Newhalls’ conviction that photography follows its own peculiar and characteristic variations on the principles of art.

A collection gathered together in the late 1960s, in a period when discrimination in art and photography is at an all time low, is all the more remarkable because the uniqueness of photography is celebrated. Consequently, the Exchange National Bank Collection appeals to a new sophistication, one that echoes Alfred Stieglitz,“ Art or not Art,there IS Photography. ”

Minor White

WE are happy to have helped the Exchange National Bank of Chicago and its dynamic young staff, especially its president, Samuel Wm. Sax, to assemble and present the collection of photographs briefly represented here. The ardent interest of the Bank and their immediate response to aspects of photography often unknown to them before has made possible a pioneering adventure in the arts: a commercial enterprise is acquiring and publicly presenting a collection of a scope and quality equal to the far older and larger collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House. Right now, as we go to press, the Bank is acquiring important photographs by old and new masters. Important as they are, they will have to wait for a second edition of this catalogue—or until you go to see them in Chicago.

Beaumont

Nancy Newhall