Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs February 9–May 4, 2014
George S. Zimbel, Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder, “The Seven Year Itch,” New York, 1954, gelatin silver print, printed 1993, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jonathan and Cynthia King. © George S. Zimbel
Louis Faurer, Family, Times Square, 1949–50, dye imbibition print, printed 1980, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Caldecott Chubb. © Estate of Louis Faurer
Herb Ritts, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume, 1987, gelatin silver print, ed. # 13/25, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Manfred Heiting Collection, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © Herb Ritts Foundation
Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1930s–40s, color carbro print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Anton and Karen Bruehl. © Estate of Anton Bruehl
Dan Winters, Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson, 1994, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © Dan Winters
John Dyer, Selena, 1992, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © 1992 John Dyer All Rights Reserved
Tazio Secchiaroli, Anthony Steel and Anita Ekberg on Via Veneto, Rome, 1958, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Carla and Lorenzo Borlenghi Collection of Italian Photographs, Museum purchase as a matching gift to donations of Ermy Borlenghi and Gordon Bonfield and Cathy and Giorgio Borlenghi. © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli
William Wegman, Fay Ray in Custom Boots, 1989, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © William Wegman
Celebrating the heyday of magazines, this exhibition explores the significant types of photographs made for the printed page.
Photographs have come a long way since the first halftone—a picture of Steinway Hall in Manhattan—was published in the New York Daily Graphic in 1873. The images needed to command a reader’s attention and entice a passerby to stop and purchase the publication. Magazines grew quickly in number and specialty, to a peak reached between 1920 and the 1980s. With the rise of the Internet, print media has been on the decline, but the impact of important images made for magazines still resonates in the 21st century.
Drawn entirely from the MFAH collection, Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs surveys this richly historic era through some 80 images published by magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Life, Texas Monthly, and Vogue. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, first published in newspapers and later in magazines, are also included. Among the artists represented are Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Edward Steichen, and William Wegman.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.