Time Travelers

Encounters with extraordinary photographs, from the very beginnings of the medium to the present day

Highlighting a selection of extraordinary photographs spanning more than a century of the medium's history, Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection presents images that transport viewers across space and time. Reflecting a multitude of styles, approaches, and processes, the works in Time Travelers date from photography's earliest years to our present moment. Alongside works by artists such as Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Julia Margaret Cameron, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Hiro, Robert Mapplethorpe, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, and Edward Steichen, the publication also features vernacular photographs, including personal snapshots and press images.

Time Travelers is published in celebration of a major gift made in memory of Gayle Greenhill, a longtime member of the Committee on Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inviting readers into an extended contemplation of the images, the publication pairs each work with a text-including five scholarly essays and ten one-page reflections-that illuminates the specific ideas, processes, and circumstances that shaped it. Time Travelers offers encounters with people, things, and events from outside our own place and time, in the spirit of photographer Emmet Gowin's avowal: "For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another."