Exhibition Concept

Cloud Album Photographs From The Archive Of Modern Conflict

Curated by Luce Lebart and Timothy Prus. Circulated by The Polygon Gallery in partnership with the Archive of Modern Conflict. Texts by Luce Lebart. Installation photographs: The Polygon Gallery.

At the dawn of photography, when photographs required long exposures, images of clouds were almost impossible. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century, with improvements in photographic acumen and technology, that photographers could actively begin to capture the infinite variability of clouds. So began, in the 1880s, an avid fixation with the subject, an affinity that has since generated innumerable images — often for scientific uses, such as developing an international naming system or visualizing cloud movement on a planetary scale, and also for limitless documentary and artistic purposes.

Cloud Album seeks to celebrate the breadth and beauty of images of clouds through the unique efforts – of scientists, amateurs, and artists alike – of picturing the sky. Through these diverse practices, the exhibition draws a picture of the history of the sky, the history of photography, and the ways in which they are intertwined.

Included are works by such renowned photographers as Eadweard Muybridge, Gustave Le Gray, Tina Modotti, Josef Sudek, Mario Giacomelli and Edward Steichen.

Featuring over 251 works including 200 photographs and 50 albums, books and drawings, the exhibition ranges from the first cloud classification proposed by British chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard in 1803 and pre-photographic Cloud Studies by English painter John Constable, to a view of a large storm system taken from Apollo 9 in 1969.

The works are drawn from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict, an organization founded in 1991 and dedicated to the collection and preservation of vernacular photographs, objects, artefacts, curiosities, and ephemera. Representations of clouds and the sky have been a focus of AMC’s vast and thematically diverse repository from its outset. We extend our gratitude to David Thomson for his inspiration and vision. Cloud Album has also been facilitated by exceptional loans from The University Museum, The University of Tokyo (UMUT) and Brad Feuerhelm.