Out of the Box: Camera-less Photography

From the earliest days of photography, artists have experimented with ways to record images without the use of a conventional camera apparatus. One of the acknowledged founders of the medium, the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, was among the first to make camera-less pictures this way, calling them “photogenic drawings.” Starting with Talbot, then moving on to the surrealist “rayograms” of Man Ray and continuing with works by photographers including Robert Heinecken, Ellen Carey, Walead Beshty, and Adam Fuss, the exhibition illustrates the myriad ways in which the materials and techniques of photography can create meaning without a camera. Out of the Box will present 50 works in this tradition, primarily drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection of photography, most of which have never been shown publicly. The exhibition is curated by Tim B. Wride, William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography.