Review of the Annenberg Space for Photography
Do digital projection and a nice building make a for a good photo viewing experience? by Robert Shults, May 2009 (updated June 2009)
In April of 2009, photographers from around the world descended upon Los Angeles for the city’s inaugural “Month of Photography” (MOPLA). Many of these visitors took note of the coincidental opening of the Annenberg Space for Photography, the newest project of The Annenberg Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. The free, photography-dedicated museum opened to the public on March 27, generating a great deal of anticipatory discussion among participants in MOPLA’s many events.
Much of this buzz, however, was surprisingly negative, the bulk of discontent revolving around two aspects of the museum’s design. Consternation over the museum’s novel use of digital projection seemed firmly split along generational lines. “It’s like looking at a Rembrandt flip by you,” said one notable Vietnam-era photojouranlist. “I don’t think all this digital flipping really respects the photographer as an artist.”
Robert Shults
The building’s physical design appeared to be a more contentious and wide-spread issue. While most praised the Annenberg’s seemingly endless generosity, photographers I spoke to variously described the space as “creepy”, “awkward”, “horribly lit”, and “kind of a gimmick.” Nestled among the glass and steel monoliths of Century City, the museum occupies a modest 10,000 square feet on the former footprint of the Shubert Theater. When developers raze a cultural landmark, the city of Los Angeles requires that a similar community contribution be erected in its place. “We did a cultural audit of the landscape of L.A., which pointed to the fact that there wasn’t a prominent venue devoted to photography as its single mission,” explains Leonard Aube, Managing Director of the Annenberg Foundation.
Foundation president Wallis Annenberg, who last year provided funding for a photography study room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, counts photography among her personal passions and immediately offered her support for the concept as one of her “signature projects”. Annenberg determined that the new space should showcase photographs in a variety of uniquely accessible displays, including traditional prints, digital projection, and published material. “Photography is one of the most accessible art forms,” she says, “and this will be an accessible space. We see it as a service to the community, where people can view the world through a different lens.”
The task of creating such a space fell to the architectural firm AECOM Design, who envisioned an interior “influenced by the mechanics of a camera.” At the front desk, backed by a glittering wall of clear, plastic beads, visitors meet the first of the museum’s many cheerful and extremely knowledgeable docents and receive an introduction to the space. It is here that photographers may encounter one of the museum’s more puzzling aspects. The Annenberg Space for Photography does not allow photography within its walls. The public is invited to photograph the exterior of the building, but exposures are strictly forbidden inside the galleries and classrooms. Hospitality Manager David Seck explains that the museum originally intended to allow photography of the building’s unique interior, but altered the policy in deference to the copyright concerns of exhibiting artists.
Robert Shults
The centerpiece of the museum is the Digital Gallery, a central rotunda which one enters via a narrow slit adjacent to the main entrance. This room is capped by five blade-shaped ceiling panels, which form an iris around a backlit faux-skylight and constitute the designers’ most overt reference to a camera. A pair of seamless 7×14’ rear-projection screens embedded in the walls display a fifteen-minute slideshow of works by exhibiting photographers, intercut with video interviews of the artists. A series of smaller flat-screen monitors throughout the gallery shows the same program on a continuous loop, with staggered starting times. Each Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from noon until 2:00 PM, this gallery hosts a special program dubbed “Soul Food”, which consists of smaller bodies of work projected in synchronization with popular music.
Upon leaving the Digital Gallery, the visitor passes two enormous support columns encased in taut strands of metal ball bearings. Visitors are cautioned not to touch these structures, which are apparently intended to evoke a shutter curtain mechanism. From here, one enters the first space that resembles a traditional gallery. Framed paper prints are mounted onto giant slabs of gray lava rock hewn from the grounds of Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ Palm Springs estate. These panels, which are nearly 18% gray, provide an ideal, non-distracting backdrop for the exhibited imagery, focusing the eye on the prints. In fact, the entire structure is decorated in a grayscale palette. Not a bit of color graces the interior of the museum, save for that in the photographs themselves.
Unfortunately, several visual distractions are introduced as the display wall curves around the Digital Gallery, mimicking a film’s path of travel through a camera. The syntax of a gallery arrangement is always an important concern. Each image should, ideally, contribute to a cohesive statement formed by the series. “The whole display was put here with great intention to force the eye to think, and that’s the mission of The Annenberg Foundation.” says Seck. “To advance public well-being through improved communication.”
Robert Shults
While the Annenberg’s guest curators have paid appropriate attention to this aspect of the gallerist’s art, the convex display surface occasionally makes perceiving the structural rhythm of a series somewhat difficult. This issue is admittedly minor and afflicts only a small portion of the exhibition. The gallery’s lighting, however, is of more concern. The bulk of traditional prints in the museum face two walls made entirely of glass. These grand windows, which certainly help the building blend into the surrounding architecture, face southeast and southwest, ensuring a constant glare of direct sunlight at virtually any time of the day. The windows have been covered with thick, translucent shades which slightly minimize reflections on the framed photographs, but bright shafts of sunlight still pierce the hall, disrupting the visual continuity of the space. The best time to view these prints may be late in the afternoon, when the sun falls behind the main buildings of Century Plaza.
The southeast corner of the space contains a pair of Microsoft Surface computers, two of only 150 in the world. These interactive tables contain a cache of thousands of images from exhibiting photographers, many times the number that the museum could reasonably display on its walls. Visitors may peruse photographs at their leisure, in virtually any orientation and arrangement they choose, using the powerful touch-screen interface. According to docents, this is one of the most popular areas of the museum, particularly among younger visitors. The Print Gallery wall eventually flattens out as the visitor returns to the front desk, the glittering panel behind it now recognizable as symbolic of the silver grains on a sheet of film.
Tucked away in the opposite corner of the museum, the visitor finds an elegant library, workshop space, and kitchen. The library contains a humble yet comprehensive selection of vintage and modern photography books from the likes of Aperture and Magnum, among others, available for examination at a dining room-style table. A small stack of magazines includes Lenswork, American Photo, and Photo District News. A large flat-panel monitor faces the table, playing a slideshow of front-page images from the L.A. Times archive. This same slideshow as well as some prints from the archive are on display outside the restrooms.
Robert Shults
A glass wall divides the library and workshop space cum kitchen. An inscription on the wall, adjacent to shelves actually stocked with wine and fruit, explains the logic: “The best conversations’ (sic) happen in the kitchen!” Two rows of tables and comfortable, modern office chairs face another flat-screen monitor showing the same program seen in the Digital Gallery. This space hosts the “Iris Nights” lecture series, which features hour-long discussions by exhibiting photographers and other notable guests. The lectures are, like all programs at the museum, free and open to the public, but reservations must be made in advance. In addition, the museum periodically offers special workshops conducted by exhibiting photographers. These events will include introductory digital photography classes, as well as “master-class settings for established photographers.”
The Annenberg Space for Photography is not without its flaws, and it is easy to see why reactions among working photographers have been mixed. The building’s orientation lets in an unacceptable amount of direct ambient light and the slightly foreboding interior design occasionally verges on novelty architecture. While I am wary of dismissing concerns over the value of digital exhibitions entirely, I suspect that such criticisms are derived, primarily, from entrenched modes of thinking about the nature of photographic art. If the Annenberg Space excels at anything, it is unparalleled at challenging viewers’ perceptions.
The gallery represents a paradigm shift in museum presentation. Definitely not a place for the passive observance of aesthetics, it is a spirited, dynamic space, demanding active participation and exploration by its visitors. Ultimately, those visitors will receive from the Annenberg Space for Photography as much or as little as they wish to invest in it.
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