California Museum of Photography

Do you know there is a California Museum of Photography ? Me either ! I just happen to stumbled upon them while digging for local events here in LA. The museum is located over on the campus of the University of California - Riverside. A bit far but I took a look at their schedule and there's some nice exhibitions going on.

MARILYN MONROE : The Fabulous and the Faux (January 31, 2009 - April 04, 2009)

The Marilyn Monroe portraits in this exhibition represent some of the most renowned images of the actress and portray her as friendly, flirty, and fragile. Portraits by Philippe Halsman created for LIFE magazine depict Marilyn Monroe performing staged narrative activities. Along with the Halsman portraits are two works by Bert Stern, on loan from the artist: the first from Marilyn Monroe’s “Last Sitting,” the second Lindsay Lohan’s 2008 re-creation of that portrait for New York Magazine. Seen together, Halsman and Stern’s photographs illustrate the visual legacy of Marilyn Monroe and some of the many roles Monroe played while in the photographers’ gaze.

ANDY WARHOL 15 MINUTES (January 31, 2009 - April 04, 2009)

Especially in the 1,000s of color Polaroids he took, but also in his many black and white photographs, Andy Warhol was trying to fill the time. Warhol regarded modern life as a process of constant distraction in which a new scene—or even a whole new movie—came onto the screen every few minutes. The trick was to go with the flow, to let yourself be amused by it, or at least bemused in a detached, vaguely ironic way, in order to stave off the one looming threat to life itself: boredom.

“In the future,” Warhol famously said, “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Some of his formal portrait sessions with the Polaroid camera probably took no more than fifteen minutes. Yet the results have produced an enduring fascination with this artist who became the Master of Ceremonies of listlessness.

THE SCREEN OF NATURE Early Photography of the West (January 31, 2009 - April 04, 2009)

The centerpiece of this exhibition is a folding screen that's in UCR/California Museum of Photography collection. Twenty-six mammoth-plate photographs of Yosemite done in the 1860s and 1870s by California photographer Carleton Watkins are mounted on this decorative screen four panels long. This is one of the few great caches of work by Watkins not on view this winter in the Getty Museum's otherwise comprehensive exhibition organized around Watkins' career.

Perhaps one of these Saturdays I might venture over to Riverside and check this museum out !

+EDIT+ : Reader just emailed and told me it is actually NOT on the campus but a few miles east. My bad !

California Museum of Photography
3824 Main St
Riverside, CA 92501
951-827-4787


www.cmp.ucr.edu