Harry Shunk and Janos Kender’s Leap into the Void is among the 180 works seen in ”Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.” Yasufumi Nakamori, curator for the show, says French artist Yves Klein, seen diving from the second story of a building into an empty street below, is known for his role in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. What’s less well-known is Klein’s time studying with a judo master in Japan. ”The famous picture is related to his involvement in the sport,” Nakamori tells us. ”It is made up of two photographs: one where he jumped from the second floor of a judo studio waiting to be caught by nine guys (who were presumably his fellow judo wrestlers) holding a big sheet of cloth in a street, and the other a photograph of the same location without any of the guys or the artist. If you enlarge the final photograph of his jumping, you can trace where the two base photographs were joined.”
”Faking It” is the first major exhibition dedicated to the long history of photographic manipulation, which Nakamori says reaches back to the earliest days of photography. ”I was surprised to learn…how widely relatively simple manipulations — such as multiple exposure…using multiple negatives…hand coloring and retouching — have been used by a wide range of photographers from a very early point in the history of photography, and that their desires to manipulate an image and construct an alternative truth have been continued since then.”
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 12:15 to 7 p.m. Sundays. Through August 25. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-639-7500 or visit mfah.org. Free to $13.
Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: June 2. Continues through Aug. 25, 2013
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.