Museums fed up with travelers' selfie sticks

They used to be called self-portraits. Today they have a shorthand name; “selfies.” With selfies becoming more and more popular, a piece of gear designed to help make selfies, the “selfie stick,” has emerged, and is causing major concerns and consternation at museums across the globe.

While smartphone selfies are a 21^st century phenomenon, the first selfies appeared more than 33 centuries ago. Archaeologists, discovered a selfie made in 1365 BCE by Pharaoh Akhenaten's chief sculptor Bak. The great Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn is the all-time king of the selfie. He painted self-portraits from the time he was a young man, until shortly before his death in 1669.

During the first half of the 19^th century selfies became a photographic staple. Robert Cornelius, a life long Philadelphian, is reputed to have made the first photo selfie in 1839. The famous US Civil War photographer Mathew Brady made many self-portraits.

Travelers have been making selfies in front of favorite sights such as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, at the edge of the magnificent Grand Canyon, or while just having a meal on a cruise, since photography became mainstream.

Photography Exhibition: The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Julia Margaret Cameron

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is one of the premier art museums in the world. When they have a photographic exhibition, you can be sure of its extremely high quality and its careful composition and construction. The Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition will be no exception.

This exhibition will run from August 19, 2013 through January 5, 2014.

Photography Exhibition: The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Night Vision:Photography After Dark

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is one of the premier art museums in the world. When they have a photographic exhibition, you can be sure of its extremely high quality and its careful composition and construction.

At the turn of the last century, night photography came into its own as an artistic genre. In the early years of the medium, capturing images under low-light conditions was nearly impossible, but by the early twentieth century, faster films, portable cameras, and commercial flashbulbs freed artists to explore the graphic universe of shimmering light and velvety darkness that reveals itself in the hours between dusk and dawn.

Night Vision: Photography After Dark examines the work of the night camera artists.

This exhibition will run through September 18, 2011

Photography Exhibition: The Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is one of the premier art museums in the world. When they have a photographic exhibition, you can be sure of its extremely high quality and its careful composition and construction.

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on “The Pictures Generation.” Educated in the self-reflexive and critical principles of Minimal and Conceptual art, this tightly knit group of artists brought those lessons to bear on a return to recognizable imagery, exploring how images shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world. Featured are 160 works in all media by thirty artists.

This exhibition will run through August 2, 2009

Young artists who came of age in the early 1970s were greeted by an America suffused with disillusionment from dashed hopes for political and social transformation to the continuation of the Vietnam War and the looming Watergate crisis. The utopian promise of the counterculture had devolved into a commercialized pastiche of rebellious stances prepackaged for consumption, and the national mood was one of catatonic shell-shock in response to wildly accelerated historical change, from the sexual revolution to race riots and assassinations. Similarly, the elder generation of artists seemed to have both dramatically expanded the field of what was possible in the field of art while staking out its every last claim, either by dematerializing the aesthetic object entirely into the realm of pure idea or linguistic proposition as in Conceptualism, or by rivaling the cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world itself as did the so-called earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, who died in 1973.

The exhibition includes works from John Baldessari, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Troy Brauntuch, Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Zwack and others.

If you’re in the New York City area through August 2nd, I strongly suggest you take in this amazing exhibition.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.