Life through a lens

The Conversations exhibition at IMMA reflects on the relationship between photographers and their subjects, Carl Dixon reports.

THE more than 100 photographs in the Conversations exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin are drawn from the Bank of America Collection. The Bank of America — or rather, its subsidiary, the Exchange Bank of Chicago — began building its collection in 1967, hiring Beaumont and Nancy Newhall to acquire a selection of contemporary photographs on its behalf.

The bank’s choice of the Newhalls could hardly have been more astute. Beaumont Newhall was the first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). In 1937, he mounted a museum retrospective of photography’s first century that helped establish the medium as an art form in America. And between them, the Newhalls curated so many exhibitions of photography and published and lectured so extensively that they were respected worldwide as authorities in their field.