Awards
2012 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection
Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection (2010)
Between 1945 and 1963, the husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim created one of the earliest and most comprehensive photography collections in the world, including the world’s first-known photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. The Gernsheim Collection (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2010) is the accompanying catalogue to the survey exhibition, Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection, on view from September 7, 2010, to January 2, 2011, at the Harry Ransom Center for Photography at the University of Texas at Austin. Roy Flukinger a senior curator at the Harry Ransom Center, has assembled an exceptional volume of 126 masterpieces from the Gernsheim collection, with each photograph beautifully reproduced and analyzed in readable, absorbing prose. Flukinger traces the story of this landmark collection, recounting the Gernsheims’ achievements as sleuths, gatherers, connoisseurs, photographers, devotees, and champions, while at the same time recognizing and examining their (sometimes controversial) role as architects of modern photography scholarship. Contributions by Alison Nordström and Mark Haworth-Booth provide insightful analyses of the role this collection has played in the histories of photography and of the effects that Helmut Gernsheim’s forceful personality and opinions had upon his colleagues. The Gernsheim Collection considers the process, as well as the underlying principles, assumptions, and implications, of canon formulation in an emerging discipline. Much more than a celebratory tome, this volume provides a rich survey of the drive and ambition of great collectors and the objects they cherished, as well as an appraisal of the pitfalls such personalities can create. A selected (but quite comprehensive) bibliography and exhibition history makes this publication not only a record of the riches of this collection, but also an important contribution to the history of taste and patronage.
Jury: Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, chair; Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Phillip Earenfight, Dickinson College; Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College; and Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty Museum.
2012 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Read about Maryan Ainsworth’s Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, the Complete Works, the winner of the 2012 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.
