Views from Within: Photographs from the Collection

This selection of eleven photographs, drawn from the museum and community collections, brings together images depicting intimate interior spaces. Details such as the television set, plastic-covered lamp shade, and fringed upholstery in Diane Arbus’s unromanticized image Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. (1963), clearly reference a particular time and location in America’s first suburb in Long Island. Other images, like Brett Weston’s Interior, Japan (1970) emphasize formal composition and design through a focus on the diagonal lines and varied tones of gray in the sliding doors and tatami mats of a Japanese house. 

Also included in the rotation are works by William Anderson, Linda Butler, Keith Carter, Laura Letinsky, Duane Michaels, Karl Struss and Jerry Uelsmann. Whether exuding a sense of peaceful solitude or an undercurrent of domestic unease, these everyday objects, personal moments, and overlooked spaces serve as reminders that beauty may be found in the experience of quiet moments, if we simply take the time to pause for a closer look. 
 
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Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971). Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963, 1963 (printed 1969–70). Gelatin silver print. Gift of Jeffrey Fraenkel, 2020 (2020-02-01)