6 ideas
Arranging a medium's history around recurring subjects such as hats, benches, roads and doorways, rather than by date or school, puts works decades apart side by side. Comparison then happens at the level of how each maker handles an identical object. Style, temperament and influence become visible as differences within a fixed subject.
Photographers from Paul Strand to Walker Evans to André Kertész kept photographing blind people, including street accordionists and Strand's 1916 woman with a 'BLIND' sign. A blind subject cannot see the camera, so the photographer can look without being looked back at.
Because the sitters did not know they were being photographed, their faces showed unguarded, inward expressions that no posed portrait could produce. The project shows that removing the subject's awareness of the camera changes what a face reveals.
In a photograph a hat quietly records a wearer's class, occupation, era and self-regard. It also shades or frames the face, which changes how much of the person the camera gets. Tracking hats across decades turns an incidental accessory into a historical document, and it shows how a period vanishes as its hats do.
The same compositions, such as an empty chair, a road running to the horizon, or a shop doorway, recur across generations, often without any conscious quotation. Later photographers see the world through images already absorbed from earlier ones. A 'new' photograph is therefore partly a continuation of an older one, and the moment it captures keeps extending through later images.
Alfred Stieglitz made many close studies of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands, treating them as a portrait of her character without showing her face. He later photographed clouds as 'Equivalents', images meant to correspond to states of feeling rather than to depict a thing. Both projects move the portrait away from likeness and toward a part or an abstraction that carries the inner life.