VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

In 2009, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired 100 black-and-white photographs by the American street photographer Simpson Kalisher (b. 1926), given by Gloria Richards, who has been a constant supporter of the artist’s work. Kalisher’s pictures document every day scenes primarily from the 1950s and ’60s in a profound—yet straight-forward—fashion. In celebration of the gift, 59 of the photographs will be on view in Simpson Kalisher: The Alienated Photographer, from May 17 to September 18, 2011, in the lower level of the MFAH Caroline Wiess Law Building. The photographs primarily capture the social landscape of New York. The show will also include an image from Kalisher’s first photojournalism series, Railroad Men, which was published in the book Railroad Men, photographs and collected stories (1961).

Kalisher’s work enriches the renowned MFAH photography collection, which features already-strong holdings of his contemporaries: street photographers who came of age with the Beat generation and whose snapshot aesthetic and groundbreaking photojournalism defined the era. The MFAH collection includes photographs taken by Kalisher’s contemporaries: Bruce Davidson (b. 1933), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), and Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), and is particularly rich in prints by Robert Frank (b. 1924), whose films the MFAH also has been distributing since 1986.

“A master of social observation, Kalisher magnificently captures the changing social landscape of the 1950s and 1960s as well as the shift to photographs in which the public being photographed reacts to the photographer, as in the image above,” said Anne Wilkes Tucker, The MFAH Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography. “The addition of Kalisher’s work to the MFAH photography collection enriches our holdings immensely in this major genre of ‘street photography’.”

In the foreword to Kalisher’s new book, The Alienated Photographer, critic Luc Sante writes that Kalisher is “our Virgil through this rapidly receding time, giving the impression in every frame of remembering a stricter but richer past while also perceiving the outline and maybe even the details of the anarchic future . . . There are photographs here that will seem instantly familiar . . . [because] they seem to represent the culmination of a thousand thoughts that were in the air.”

Kalisher came of age in the 1950s, when the professional photographer’s aesthetic was defined by the images that graced the pages of Life magazine. Some of the photographs in the exhibition were taken for a New York Council on the Arts grant, which was first offered in 1968 to create a document of the city of Syracuse during a time of drastic changes to the city’s downtown, as well as to neighborhood and factories. The grant was renewed three times, allowing him to make thousands of photographs in Syracuse between 1968 and 1973. Kalisher subsequently had a long career as a photojournalist and a commercial photographer. In 1976, he published his second book Propaganda and other Photographs. Now 85 years old, Kalisher is still an active photographer and lives in New York City.

Sequenced along the walls of the MFAH Brown Corridor will be Kalisher’s black-and-white images of men and women from a bygone era, frozen in time in the course of their daily life, both at work and play. Subjects include patriotic street parades; city toughs; cute and snarly children; Viet Nam War veterans; automobiles; storefronts; and cityscapes.

Kalisher’s photographs are in the permanent collections of major US museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman House, the Jewish Museum New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Everson Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.