A glorious harvest.

• Author: Barberie, Peter
• Position: Focus on the World - Exhibition of photography in honor of curator and editor Michael E. Hoffman

PHOTOGRAPHY arguably is the most important visual medium of modern times, and certainly is the most widespread. The breadth of contemporary photography and the accomplishments of one of its greatest promoters are celebrated in the exhibition "Glorious Harvest: Photographs from the Michael E. Hoffman Tribute Collection."

Eighty-five images--which vary from a deceptively classic black-and-white landscape by Robert Adams to an enormous color tableau by Richard Misrach to an artful combination of image and text in the cyanotype process by Clarissa Sligh--honor the career of Michael E. Hoffman, the adjunct curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1968 98 and publisher of the photography magazine Aperture. The Museum received the photographs in 2003 from the artists or their estates, and the collection includes pictures by many of the photographers whose work Hoffman exhibited or published. It is an exciting and diverse survey of contemporary work, featuring pictures by an international roster of luminaries, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Christenberry, Martine Franck, Eikoh Hosoe, Graciela Iturbide, Mimmo Jodice, and Nick Waplington.

Lynne Honickman, a photography benefactor who worked with Hoffman at the Aperture Foundation, writes, "Michael shared his turmoil, but he also shared his brilliance, dreams and ardent beliefs and the photographic universe is more vibrant, richer and finer for his presence."

Many of the photographs in the exhibition reflect Hoffman's interests and his passionate convictions about photography, as an art form and journalistic tool. The small Robert Adams landscape, "Edge of a Clearcut. Columbia County, Oregon" presents a scene of environmental degradation, but one framed as a beautiful landscape. This gelatin silver print of a controversial subject does not permit the observer to arrive at any simple ideas about the scenery or about the actions represented. Much different in scale and appearance, Richard Misrach's enormous chromogenic print "Dead Animals #79" depicts another troubling scene, a pit for animal carcasses in the middle of the desert. It is difficult to look at the details of decay on such a large scale, but they, like the landscape, are subsumed by the monumental representation of death itself.

Hoffman was committed to photography of the cultures of India, Tibet, and other parts of Asia, and numerous shots in the exhibition reflect this passion. Lynn Davis' "The Bayon. Angkor...