Photographic Books and Prints from the Special Collections of the Newark Public Library
Curated by Jared Ash

January 20 - March 20, 2010

Main Library
Third Floor Gallery
5 Washington Street
Newark, NJ

Long before many other museums and art institutions in the United States, the Newark Public Library accepted and promoted photography as a fine art form rather than merely a mechanical means of documentation and reproduction. Since 1911, when the Library hosted Modern Pictorial Photography, an exhibition organized by the Newark Museum Association featuring works by Clarence H. White, Gertrude Käsebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, among others, the Newark Public Library has actively exhibited and acquired photographic books, journals, and original photographs.

The Library's collection of photographic literature spans from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and includes some of the most iconographic and seminal "photo-books" of our time.

Among the highlights of the Library's collections on view in the exhibition are select issues of Camera Work (a photography journal published and directed by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 through 1917 that features original photogravure prints by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, among others); Man Ray: Photographs 1920-1934, Paris by Man Ray; Photographs of Mexico, a portfolio of 20 photogravures by Paul Strand, published in 1940; and original photographs and photo-books by Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roy DeCarava, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edwin Hale Lincoln, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Sebastião Salgado, and Weegee, among others.

For more information about the exhibit, please call the Special Collections Division at 973-733-7745, or e-mail Jared Ash at jash@npl.org.