This installation of key photographs from the High Museum’s famed Bunnen Collection celebrates the important legacy of Lucinda W. Bunnen, one of the South’s most dedicated photographers and arts advocates who has helped the Museum acquire work for more than thirty years. With over 650 works in the Bunnen Collection to select from, this exhibition features some of the rarest and most valuable photographs in the High’s permanent collection. Learn more about nine of the works in the show here.
Past Exhibition
The Bunnen Collection of Photography
September 7, 2012 – February 2, 2014
The Improbable Dome, 1964, printed 1979
Clarence John Laughlin
The Improbable Dome, 1964, printed 1979
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
1981.89Clarence John Laughlin, a renowned self-taught twentieth-century photographer from New Orleans, worked during the Great Depression as a Works Progress Administration American Building Survey photographer. Between 1935 and 1965, Laughlin captured seventeen thousand large-format negatives in Louisiana. This piece is from the initial purchase of twenty-six Laughlin prints that began the Bunnen Collection at the High.
Cookie Laughing, NYC, 1985
Nan Goldin
Cookie Laughing, NYC, 1985
Cibachrome print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
2005.337.14Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio, comprising fifteen Cibachrome prints, documents the artist’s intimate friendship with actress Dorothy Karen “Cookie” Mueller, who died of AIDS in 1989. Goldin recorded their thirteen-year relationship, creating powerful and wide-ranging portraits of her friend’s life. Her visual approach is sensuous in its immediacy and marked by a strong fusion of opulent, saturated colors illuminated with artificial light. Goldin’s preferred settings for the Cookie portraits were the interior spaces in which their personal dramas took place.
Untitled (Freezer), ca. 1971‐1973, printed 1980
William Eggleston
Untitled (Freezer), ca. 1971‐1973, printed 1980
Dye transfer print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
1983.55William Eggleston is credited as one of the first major proponents of color photography in America. Eggleston showed an early interest in the arts and began making color photographs in 1965, a time when the medium was rarely shown in art museums. His images commonly focus on the mundane objects of everyday life. Here a number of groceries are stuffed into a small freezer, the bright pastel boxes of food standing out against a backdrop of white frost.
Untitled, 20th century
Oraien Catledge
Untitled, 20th century
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
2012.602A resident of Atlanta for more than thirty-five years, Oraien Catledge is known for documenting Cabbagetown, beginning in the 1970s when the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill closed its doors. The Appalachian people who had been employed at the mill stayed in the community, and Catledge began exploring the area with his Leica camera and a station wagon full of film. Over the next twenty years he took twenty-five thousand images of the residents of the town, documenting the evolving working-class South in the 1980s and 1990s with honest clarity.
Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodburn, Washington, 1979
Joel Sternfeld
Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodburn, Washington, 1979
Color dye transfer print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
1983.53With a career spanning almost forty years, Joel Sternfeld is one of color photography’s most influential and enduring practitioners. Sternfeld’s work reveals an artist in touch with nearly every aspect of what makes America the nation it is: the uniqueness of its people, the fragility of nature in the face of the built environment, and how the past consistently reveals – and underscores – the present. Here Sternfeld captures an unexpected scene on a quiet country road as an exhausted escaped elephant is revived.
The Brown Sisters, 1979
Nicholas Nixon
The Brown Sisters, 1979
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San FranciscoNixon’s best-known series, The Brown Sisters is a serial portrait study that began in 1975 and continues to the present. Each year the photographer records an image of his wife Beverly (Bebe) Brown together with her three sisters. Setting up his 8-x-10-inch camera at eye level with his subjects, Nixon captures the sisters congregated together in the same order from left to right, recording their incremental aging and evolving demeanors over time. Although he makes multiple exposures, Nixon chooses only one to represent the women in print each year.
Man in Wall Window, New York City, 1970-1975
Lucinda W. Bunnen
Man in Wall Window, New York City, 1970-1975
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Robert Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
2002.11Bunnen was involved with the first photography class offered at the Atlanta College of Art in 1970. Less than six months later, she was invited by the then director of the High Museum of Art, Gudmund Vigtel, to be part of the exhibition “Georgia Artists Exhibit” the following year. In 1973, Bunnen and 13 others founded Nexus, the first photography gallery in Atlanta that showcased new work by emerging photographers, which now functions as the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art. This iconic work from her early career captures a small figure framed poetically within a lone window piercing an unfinished exterior wall.
Self-Portrait (3 Parts), 1980
Chuck Close
Self-Portrait (3 Parts), 1980
Dye diffusion print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
1981.162.1-3
© Chuck CloseThis photograph, depicting the lower half of Chuck Close’s face, is from a series of multi-panel self-portraits the artist produced while experimenting with a large-format Polaroid camera. Although photography has been essential to the creation of Close’s portrait paintings since the late 1960s, he viewed the medium primarily as a tool for his art. The artist viewed Self-Portrait (3 Parts) as a finished piece rather than as a reference for the creation of a painting.
Overview
Thirty years ago, the High unveiled the establishment of the Bunnen Collection – a major group of photographs put together on behalf of the Museum by Atlanta photographer and philanthropist Lucinda W. Bunnen. Working in collaboration with a small group of peers in the community, Bunnen had assembled a world class holding meant to establish the High as one of the nation’s premiere collecting institutions for contemporary photography and to provide Atlanta with an inspirational resource.
Beginning with a purchase of 26 Clarence John Laughlin photographs, Bunnen’s collecting focused on new work by living photographers of the day, highlighting internationally renowned figures alongside those celebrated regionally. The collection was first shown and published at the High in 1983 in a project titled Subjective Vision. Since that time, Bunnen has continued to support the growth of the High’s photography collection in a significant way, adding hundreds of prints to the Collection, which now comprises more than 650 works. Her extraordinary gifts over the years yielded some of the Museum’s rarest and most valuable photographs, including prints by Edward Weston, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras, William Eggleston, and the work of Bunnen herself.
This exhibition presents a selection of significant works from the Bunnen Collection, showcasing the Museum’s rich photography holdings and celebrating the incredible legacy of one of the South’s most dedicated arts advocates.
Bio
Lucinda W. Bunnen, an avid photographer, private collector, and philanthropist residing in Atlanta, was born and raised just north of New York City in Katonah, N.Y. The combination of her father descending from a Savannah, Ga., family, and her Aunt Dot having artist friends such as Alfred Stieglitz, foreshadowed her deep involvement in photography and Southern culture. In 1952, Lucinda married Bobby Bunnen after he graduated with a degree in oral surgery in Boston, and the two moved to Atlanta. The couple built a home in Buckhead where she still lives to this day.
After a trip to Peru in the latter half of the 1960s, Bunnen became enamored with the process of capturing and sharing her experiences through photography. Bunnen was involved with the first photography class offered at the Atlanta College of Art in 1970. Less than six months later, after officially deciding to pursue photography, she was invited by the then director of the High Museum of Art, Gudmund Vigtel, to be part of the exhibition “Georgia Artists Exhibit” the following year. This led to Richard Hill, an Atlanta photographer and gallerist, offering Bunnen the first exhibition of photographs in a commercial fine art gallery in Atlanta. In 1973, Bunnen and 13 others founded Nexus, the first photography gallery in Atlanta that showcased new work by emerging photographers.
Bunnen’s body of work over the past 40 years has been characterized by an oscillation between experimental and documentary impulses. Bunnen’s first book, Movers and Shakers, documented the leaders working to transform Atlanta into a cosmopolitan city in the 1970s. Since that time, her extensive travels, as well as the landscape around her home, provided a rich assortment of subjects for Bunnen’s photographic projects.
Meeting Lee Witkin of the Witkin Gallery in New York in 1970 proved to be an influential moment in Bunnen’s life. Not only did Witkin encourage her to collect photographs, he urged her to champion the medium at arts institutions. When she began collecting, the photography market was still in its infancy and photography departments were not widely represented at museums. Later in the 1970s, Bunnen set out to assemble a world-class holding of photographs for the High Museum in Atlanta and to provide the city’s inhabitants with an inspirational resource. Bunnen and a small group of peer advisors focused on new work by living photographers, including internationally renowned artists and notable regional figures. Bunnen’s gifts to the High over the years include prints by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Emmet Gowin, Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer and Cindy Sherman. Bunnen is a Life Member of the High Museum of Art’s Board of Directors.