Blog post by Rose Mulhern  3 March, 2014

 The exhibit “60 from the 60’s” is a collection of sixty works from photographers who were active during the 1960’s in the United States. The collection is on loan to the New York State Museum from the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. The exhibition features works from ten artists of the era: Gary Winogrand, Harry Callahan, Hollis Frampton, Mary Ellen Mark, Betty Hahn, Benedict J. Fernandez, Robert Heinecken, Roger Mertin, Arnold Mewman and Aaron Siskand, a mixture of artists who were well known at the time and those who were just beginning to be known and recognized.

 The artists’ works focuses on a wide range of subject matter, from documentary style shots, such as Benedict J. Fernandez’s Dissenters: Unites Nations Plaza, New York City, in which the Dissenters are captured mid emotion, their mouths open in silent shouts and screams, to more surreal images like Gary Winograd’s San Marco, Texas; an underwater shot of a bikini clad girl swimming in a clear pool with her piglet doggie paddling behind her.

 One of my favorite images in the exhibit are Arnlod Newman’s Stravinsky Studying Scores(upon seeing this I could tell that it was the same photographer whose portrait Pablo Picasso Vallauris, France has long been a source of inspriation for me). Newman’s image of Stravinsky, an ordinary pose, is made striking by the use of monochromatic tiles, repeating and repeating, giving the photograph a fantastical quality. I also was moved and disturbed by Benedict J. Fernandez’s pentagon Demonstration, which shows the opposing side of the Dissenters: young policeman looking determined and scared, a gun muzzle so close to the camera it is out of focus.

The exhibit is a powerful example of all the different forces at work in such a short span of time.