Facing Forward: Photographic Portraits from the Collection

Drawn from SBMA's distinguished collection of photography, this installation features 25 modern and contemporary works featuring the human face as central and absorbing subject matter. Highlights include: the renowned American photographer Kwame Brathwaite's engagingly direct and vivid 1964 self-portrait from the era he and his colleagues popularized the still influential phrase "Black is Beautiful"; Austrian-American photographer Trude Fleischmann's intimate 1933 double portrait of Helen and Marion Post, who working later as Marion Post Wolcott would become one of the most important photographers of the Great Depression; Tseng Kwong-Chi's conceptual investigations into self and identity pictured in well-traveled tourist locales; and British photographer Cecil Beaton's poignant portrait of Eileen Dunn, a three-year old air raid victim during the London Blitz whose portrait from this same sitting appeared on a famous September 1940 Life magazine cover.

Image: Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1964, printed 2018. Archival pigment print, ed. 2/5. SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by PhotoFutures. © Kwame Brathwaite