Photography and the Painted Image

This exhibition explores the intersection between photography and painting, highlighting the ways in which the two mediums have overlapped and complemented each other.

The first section showcases the painted backdrop, a hallmark of 19th- and early 20th-century portrait studios, where elaborate hand-painted backgrounds framed sitters within idealized worlds.

The second section turns to the painted foreground, focusing on carnival and arcade photographs in which participants posed within humorous or fantastical cutouts that transformed their identities through caricatures and other painted figures.

The final section explores the painted photograph itself – images enhanced, tinted, or entirely transformed by the application of pigment, from subtle hand-coloring to bold overpainting.

Together, these works reveal how painting not only shaped the settings and surfaces of photography but also extended its capacity for imagination, spectacle, and self-representation, offering new ways of seeing and being seen.