A new exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Photography takes visitors on a trip through time

With photos at our fingertips thanks to smartphones and social media, do photography museums still have a place?

A new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago underscores the importance of preserving images now more than ever. As it celebrates 50 years, the gallery’s goal is to keep photography in constant dialogue with the present, especially as photographs can often hold up a mirror to current events.

Experiencing photography in real life positioned next to other works by a variety of artists reveals new dimensions of history and human life that are “very open and alive with possibilities,” head curator Karen Irvine said in an interview with the Sun-Times.

“It is really different to experience photographs as objects in a space with other people often surrounded by other objects that shift and change the way we read them,” Irvine continued.

The new exhibition, “MoCP at Fifty,” comprises five rooms that chronicle each decade of work acquired within the five decades since it opened in 1976. The show is on display through May 16. The museum was opened as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, and has always “centered on justice work,” the curator said.

Some notable acquisitions on display include work from Chicago photographer Paul D’Amato. One of his photographs, “Girl on Swing,” is on display in the collection. Taken in 1997, the image is part of his “Barrio” series, which documents the lives of Mexican American communities in Pilsen. There is an image of gay nightlife by Doug Ischar, too, who is best known for photographing Chicago’s historic gay beach, the Belmont Rocks, for his famous 1985 series “Marginal Waters.” “MoCP at Fifty” aims to keep photography through the decades in constant dialogue with the present, especially as photographs can often hold up a mirror to current events.

With that in mind, staff at the MoCP (which includes Columbia College students) thought carefully about each room and what kinds of messages they hope visitors can sit with as they travel through time.

Some photographs tell stories about the world beyond Chicago. The work of Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin, for example, acquired by the museum in 2015, is a commentary on global poverty. Through their joint project, The Poverty Line, which began in 2010, the photographers have traveled to more than 30 countries to calculate the daily food budget for the average person living on or below the poverty line and have photographed the results.Their photograph “USA #120,” on display at the MoCP, features a loaf of store-bought bread resting on a copy of the New York Times.

In the first decade of MoCP’s history, the museum acquired some early work from Dorothea Lange, one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century. She’s best known for her work during the Great Depression, and a large portion of her collection was gifted to the museum by her stepdaughter in 1985.

Observers of Lange’s work can get a deeper insight into her creative process through her 1951 photograph, “On the Street ‘Relationships.’”

“What's fun about it is that we can trace the history,” Irvine said. Lange’s crops and notations are visible in the display. “For our historical research, it’s really valuable, because people can come in and kind of almost map her mental process in the dark room.”

In 2013, an anonymous donor gave the museum a collection of William Henry Jackson’s photographs, originally done in black and white and later reprocessed to create color prints and postcards for commercial use.

With the exhibition taking place in Chicago, the MoCP team chose six of those postcards that all tie to themes of immigration and politics, among them an 1898 photo of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and a 1900 photo of a migrant worker sun-drying raisins in southern California.

“We thought in this moment, in this political moment, to put a picture of the Capitol, probably, hopefully, will have an impact on people who walk through here,” Irvine said. “And immigration is a huge, fraught topic right now. … [We’re] just kind of bringing together, we hope, some touchpoints that will make people think.”