Jake Sommer Photography

08/31/2026

📷 Shown here: Artist Man Ray

Man Ray’s artistic beginnings can be traced to the Dada movement. Dada artists shared a profound disillusionment with traditional modes of art making and often turned instead to experimentation. In his photograms, Man Ray embraced the possibilities for irrational combinations and chance arrangements of objects. Around the same time, Man Ray’s experiments with photography carried him to the center of the emergent Surrealist movement in Paris.

Working across mediums and historical movements, Man Ray was an integral part of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition program early on. His photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, films, and even a chess set were included in landmark early exhibitions at the museum.

♟️ You’ll find Ray’s “Chess Set” and more works by the artist on display in our fifth-floor galleries!

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Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). “Self-Portrait with Camera.” 1931. Gift of James Thrall Soby. © 2026 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

08/28/2026

08/25/2026

08/25/2026

04/17/2026

04/09/2026

04/04/2026

Andrei Tarkovsky was born on April 4, 1932, in Zavrazhye, on the banks of the Volga River. He grew up with his mother and sister and in 1954 entered the VGIK Film School in Moscow, where he was a student of Mikhail Romm. Recognized as one of the great cinematic masters of the 20th century, his work was marked by a spiritual quest and reflection on "the human condition," understanding cinema as an art capable of capturing time and revealing the infinite.

In addition to a filmography that includes Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1975), Solaris (1972) or Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky also left an intimate and moving photographic legacy.

In 1977, he received a Polaroid SX-camera as a gift from director Michelangelo Antonioni, and from then on, he began capturing scenes of his everyday surroundings. He produced nearly 200 Polaroids taken between 1979 and 1983, during the end of his life in Russia and his exile in Italy.

Although he never intended to include these images in his film work, the photographs reveal the same aesthetic sensibility that characterizes his movies.

The selection of 60 Polaroids exhibited after his death shows his wife, his son, his dog, and rural landscapes, as well as Italian settings, during the making of the film Nostalghia.

Polaroids exude an atmosphere of domestic harmony and, at the same time, melancholy. They convey both familial love and the impossibility of domestic happiness, reflecting a generation marked by the absence of parents after the war.

The nature of the Polaroid, with its diffused and overexposed light, transforms each moment into a condensation of reality and memory, evoking both the sacred and the ephemeral.

Tarkovsky conceived artistic creation as an affirmation of life, or as a “denial of death.” His Polaroids, more than documents, are revelations: small portable temples of memory that idealize nature and everyday life, in dialogue with the romantic tradition of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. The human presence appears as a mediation between the mystical landscape and the viewer, creating an affective geography that communicates their inner world with the environment.

Here, Tarkovsky allows himself a space for contemplation and idealization. Light, time and atmosphere are sculpted in photographs that transcend the documentary and become poetic visions. As Boris Groys pointed out, “rather than immortalizing, Tarkovsky recreates a new reality impregnated with romanticism and nostalgia, where nature becomes a mirror of the sacred.”

Today, 94 years after his birth, we remember Tarkovsky in his photographs, in an extension of his artistic search: snapshots that stopped time and revealed the spiritual beauty of everyday life. In them memory, nostalgia and love merge, inviting us to reflect on the capacity of the image to transform the experience of life into a poetic and transcendent vision.

03/28/2026

Edward Steichen, born on March 27, 1879 in Luxembourg, emigrated to the United States as a child and trained in Milwaukee. His mother influenced him in his artistic training, and at the age of 15 he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer, soon excelling in graphic design.
In 1900 he traveled to Paris, where he abandoned painting to dedicate himself to photography. There he met Rodin, with whom he collaborated closely. He also portrayed Anatole France, Richard Strauss and Henri Matisse.

In 1902 he returned to New York, where he opened a studio at 291 Fifth Avenue.
Invited by Alfred Stieglitz, he joined the Photo-Secession pictorialist movement and in 1905, they opened together the gallery “291”, where they exhibited Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Brâncuși, they were also founding partners of the magazine Camera Work.

Steichen experimented with techniques such as Autochrome and photography of insects, flowers and plants. But after the First World War he abandoned pictorialism and turned to “direct photography.”

In 1923, as head of Condé Nast, he portrayed the culture of the time and prominent figures in literature, dance, politics and cinema. His fame came from his photos for Vogue and Vanity Fair, creating some of the most stunning images of the 20th century and becoming the leading Art Deco photographer, founder of modern glamor photography.

His archive includes portraits of Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich, Amelia Earhart and Walt Disney. He also portrayed African-American figures such as Florence Mills and Paul Robeson.

In 1938 he settled in Connecticut, dedicating himself to botany and organizing an exhibition of his delphiniums. As director of the Department of Photography at MoMA (from 1947 to 1962), he organized 44 exhibitions in 15 years and published his autobiography "A Life in Photography

In 1955 he inaugurated The Family of Man, traveling through Europe and the United States where he compiled the photographs that would make up this magnificent and historic exhibition.

In his final years, he was named Director Emeritus of MoMA and was responsible for selecting the photographs that would construct his final exhibition as curator, “The Bitter Years.”

Today, 147 years after his birth, we remember Steichen as a tireless fighter for the recognition of photography as one of the fine arts, leaving a legacy, teaching and inspiring future generations.

03/21/2026

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis and studied at Sarah Lawrence College. A member and nominee of Magnum Photos, Soth published his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004, which established him as a leading voice in contemporary photography and within the documentary tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and William Eggleston.

Since then, he has published more than 25 books, including NIAGARA, The Last Days of W, Broken Manual, Dog Days Bogotá, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures, among others.

His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Walker Art Center in Minnesota, Media Space in London, and MoMA Hayama in Japan.

He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and a grant from the McKnight and Jerome Foundation. His series show portraits and landscapes along the Mississippi River, or in Songbook, made between 2012 and 2014 with Brad Zellar, where he shows meetings, festivals and community gatherings in the United States, highlighting the tension between individualism and the desire for connection.

The images are presented without context, with a fragmentary, lyrical and melancholic tone, where portraits and intimate interiors inspired by the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson, with soft colours and more intimate atmospheres, reflect on the materiality of photography and its limited ability to preserve the ephemeral.

Soth identifies as a photographer who seeks vulnerability and authenticity in ordinary people rather than models or celebrities, believing that those less exposed to the camera reveal something more real.

For him, photography is a language with different dialects, and his work is a lyrical exploration rather than a narrative one. He has experimented with various formats and literary collaborations, championing the autonomy of the image and acknowledging that photography has limitations compared to narrative mediums like film or novels, while valuing its capacity for openness and fragmentation.

In 2016, after a sabbatical year and a trip to Helsinki, he changed his artistic style to a more intimate and less ambitious approach, seeking quieter and closer portraits.

He founded Little Brown Mushroom, a platform for visual experimentation, and has worked and taught in educational projects and residency programs such as the Winnebago Workshop, a mobile workshop for young artists.

Throughout his career he has maintained a constant: the exploration of loneliness, melancholy and the tension between isolation and interaction, always with a poetic gaze and open to interpretation.

03/11/2026

Ed van der Elsken was born in Amsterdam on March 10, 1925. He was one of the most relevant figures on the artistic scene of the second half of the 20th century in Netherlands, the first true Dutch street photographer.

He toured cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo looking for what he called “his people”: authentic and genuine, with whom in many cases he identified.

Photography was for him a medium with which to experiment and externalize his own life, which is why his personality is reflected both in the relationship he establishes with his characters and in his numerous self-portraits. His work is characterized by dynamic images, with great visual impact and strong personal involvement, rather than by technical perfection.

Van der Elsken adopted a position between document and fiction, distancing himself from objective photoreportage. Preparing scenes was a constant in his career; He rarely waited for the moment and preferred to provoke it, obviously at first, but progressively more in the style of a dynamic and casual artistic director, occasionally writing down things that caught his attention in a notebook full of themes and even sketches.

His style was instinctive and unconventional, with an intense involvement with his characters. He was not interested in sophisticated photography or the search for the “perfect shot”; He immersed himself in reality and photographed it intuitively.

In 1956 he achieved international notoriety with Love on the Left Bank, a photo novel inspired by his own life in post-war Paris. The film structure, with flashbacks and changes in perspective, anticipated the artist he would become.

Throughout his career he published more than twenty photobooks, such as Bagara (1958), Jazz (1959), Sweet Life (1966), Amsterdam (1979), Avonturen op het land (1980) and Discovering Japan (1988) in which he experimented with editing techniques, creating dynamic and animated designs that became one of his hallmarks.

Starting in 1959, cinema occupied a central place in his work, his productions reflected themes of human depth giving an autobiographical and unconventional approach, including his own voice and presence on stage. After his death, his films were preserved, digitized and disseminated by Eye Filmmuseum.

Ed van der Elsken was considered the "enfant terrible" of Dutch photography. His work is mentioned alongside that of Robert Frank and William Klein, and inspired contemporary artists such as Nan Goldin or Paulien Oltheten.

His legacy, made up of photographs, photobooks and films, establish him as a voice of his time and as one of the most influential figures in 20th century photography.