Perceptual Shifts: Photographs from the Collection

These photographs show everyday sites and iconic landscapes with extreme detail, blurred focus, or experimental techniques. Mundane or well-known locations become strange or unrecognizable. We are asked to make sense of these mysterious images, only to find ourselves stymied. The artists in this exhibition upset assumptions about photography: more detail does not always mean more clarity, and sometimes seeing is not believing.

A few of the artists build sculptural sets to photograph, or manipulate their environment with lights and spray paint. Their photographs are inventions and not faithful records of some happened-upon scene. The works in this exhibition show us that photography’s potential for perceptual shifts—for deviation from conventional seeing—can help us better understand how variable and uncertain our vision and photography can be.

Perceptual Shifts features photographs from SBMA’s collection that span the analog and digital eras. Photographers include: Uta Barth, John Divola, Anthony Hernandez, Barbara Kasten, Susan Lakin, Chris McCaw, and Trevor Paglen.