Poetic Exposures

Poetic Exposures reflects on the ways artists harness the ephemeral medium of light to create meaning, bridging experiments in technology and art. The term photograph, coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839, combines two root words, the Greek photos, light, and graphos, writing or painting, literally meaning drawing with light. Early practitioners leveraged sunlight and light-sensitive chemicals to fix images, creating new ways of seeing and inviting novel understandings of time and human perception that continue to reverberate to this day. Photographers have consistently continued to explore the bounds of the medium’s relationship to light over time, creating elaborate aesthetic effects, exploring new techniques and emerging technologies, and reinventing old processes. While methods continue to transform, light remains the anchor guiding how meaning is generated through the photographic image.

This exhibition draws on Asheville Art Museum’s photography collection highlighting the spectrum of strategies artists employ as they manipulate light to various effect, from Eadweard Muybridge’s transformational studies of movement in the 1870s to Jo Sandman’s work with X-rays and photograms in the early 2000s. An ethos of experimentation—whether aesthetic or technical—links each of the works, spanning multiple time periods and photographic techniques.