Desiring Eye. Retrospective of world photography

Organisers:
Moderna Museet, Contemporary Art Centre

Curator: Leif Wigh

Artists:
Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, Guillaume Berggren, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Frank, Heinrich Kuhn, Werner Mantz, Nicola Percheid, J Pascal Sebah, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Piet Zwart, and others.

‘The Desiring Eye’ was a large retrospective exhibition revealing the evolution of photography from the 19th to the 20th century through its most remarkable examples. More than 200 early photographic portraits, early travel photography, pictorealism, new objectivism, surrealism and American modernism which have been accumulated by Moderna Museet since the early 1970s were exhibited in Vilnius.

Sweden acquired many of these photographs in the 1960s. The oldest part of the collection consists of works received in 1964 from the collection of Helmut Gernsheim and in 1965 from the collection of Professor Hermer Backstrom, a professor of the history of photography . Later it was enriched by photographs donated by Fotografiska Museet and the Association of Swedish Professional Photographs.