When reality bites back.

• Position: Focus on Society - 'Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection'

DRAWING UPON the dynamic collection of San Francisco, Calif., native Trevor Traina, "Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection" features 110 photos executed by some of the preeminent artists working in photography this past century. Mixing rare black-and-white vintage prints of classic images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand with luscious, eye-popping works in color by artists ranging from Stephen Shore and William Eggleston to Cindy Sherman, Alec Soth, and Andreas Gursky, the exhibition celebrates photography's fundamental richness and plasticity.

The exhibit examines different historical understandings of Realism and its changing definitions over time, demonstrating photography's singular, unbreakable connection to the real world, which remains part of its undeniable allure. "It was Alfred Stieglitz who, a century ago, campaigned in support of photography's expressive possibilities independent from other visual arts, because he believed the medium to be endowed with what he described as 'a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality,'" comments Julian Cox, cocurator of "Real to Real."

For the committed, creative collector, photography is a vanguard medium that provides myriad possibilities to understand our lives through the power of images. Notes Cox, "The Traina Collection includes many images that sit firmly within the tradition of photography as a craft and a vocation, alongside those made by artists who consider photography as just one medium among others from which they can select to communicate an idea.

"This use of photography within conceptual art has been at the center of Traina's most recent activity as a collector, and it brings the exhibition fully into the contemporary moment with exciting work by artists such as Jeff Wall, Roe Etheridge, Ann Collier, Alec Soth, and Christopher Williams."

Photography's ever shifting status as an art form is lull of twists and turns, and there never have been so many creative talents involved in the...