Curator

  • Art Institute Chicago
  • Harvard art museum
  • My Exhibition
A work made of silver-dye bleach prints (2).

Dusk

1976

Eve Sonneman American, born 1950

United States

To create this diptych, Eve Sonneman paired two images, taken moments apart, of tourists on an observation deck. Their shadows, as well as the photographer’s, loom large and draw attention to the darkening of the sky in the moment between the frames. By displaying images shot in rapid succession, Sonneman challenged the notion of the “decisive moment,” a reigning idea in mid-century pho-tography according to which the best picture is the one that entirely sums up a scene in a single instant. Instead, Sonneman suggests that photography can reveal time to be arbitrary and mutable, never fully frozen by the camera.

Silver-dye bleach prints (2)

Photography and Media

Women artists