PHOTO+
Mixed-Media and the Photographic Image

From the time of its invention and growing popularity, photographs have been constructed, cut, added to, and built upon. In the 19th century, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes regularly included slight color blushes or gold highlights to make them appear more life-like; black-and-white photographs often became a base for painted likenesses; and, negatives were cut, sandwiched, and montaged to create purely fictional compositions from assorted bits of reality. In the 1960s and 1970s, photographers began to question the implications and physicality of photographs. The rise of new, light sensitive materials and a new fluidity between media opened new avenues of inquiry about imagemaking and, in particular, photography’s place as a medium for making art.

Photo+ brings together mid-20th-century and contemporary objects that reveal the experimentation, inventiveness, and creativity of artists using photography in combination with other media and techniques.