It’s impossible to know what’s being taught in American high schools these days, but I hope they continue to teach photography lessons in darkrooms, and that students under those red lights make pinhole cameras. Phone cameras and Instagram have made photography the mainstream medium of this era, but taking a photo with your bare hands can change the way you see everything. The first photo I took this way was a close-up imprint of a brick wall near the Gothic student smoking area. I didn’t smoke at the time and wasn’t sure it would work. The result looked like the surface of another planet. It was blurry and cut in unexpected but engaging ways.
The art of Anne Hamilton (b. 1956) is often concerned with similar games of light and texture, and her new exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Still and the Moving Image,” deploys her practice in a way that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the institution’s off-limits sections. In this exhibition, Hamilton uses a portable scanner to offer a new perspective on a group of objects in the Cleveland Museum’s collection that are rarely displayed: small-scale figurative ceramics and nursery figures from the 13th to 19th centuries.
The resulting installation blows these objects into wall-sized pigment prints. Being a New Yorker myself, I want to say that they remind me of those wheat-covered fashion ads you see in certain neighborhoods where these dolls are trying to look really cool. What’s true of either person is that he has eccentric clothing and an incongruous combination of the aloof intimacy of a downtown model. We’ve never seen these things before and we won’t see them that way again, but the proportions and surfaces are so strange that we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at or how the image was created. These are ancient works that look old thanks to the wrinkles on the paper, but the way they are captured feels new. These hanging works resemble exotic tapestries from an exotic culture.
The exhibition catalog reminds us that although Hamilton made these images using a scanner, the term “photography” is derived from a Greek term that translates to painting with light, and the book quotes an email from her time working on a project that certainly sounds like photographing a subject with feeling: “The process of making is one of turning/getting off—turning—turning again/starting again/and this project like the others turns toward and toward/as it finds its form/again and again.” The catalog also contains small photographs of the objects she has chosen, which come from China, France, Germany and Italy. I appreciate the degree to which not much has been said about these originals, even though they are fascinating and beautiful enough to fit into their own catalog. Instead, they have surrendered themselves to Hamilton’s vision, which allows them to speak for themselves and for us to consider what other wonders might be hidden within the walls of the Cleveland Museum.
“Anne Hamilton: Still and Moving • The Tangible Image” On display at the Cleveland Museum of Art until April 19, 2026.
More show reviews
