To celebrate the reopening of the Portland Art Museum and a return to community gatherings within its many spaces, Together features photographs of people in community with one another. Drawn from the permanent collection of more than 10,000 photographs, the works span the nineteenth century to today. Many are recent acquisitions and are on view at the Museum for the first time.
Photography has been a social practice from its very beginnings. One of the earliest and most valued uses of the medium was for portraiture. Millions of daguerreotype, tintype, carte-de-visite, and cabinet-card images circulated during the second half of the nineteenth century, offering people portable, permanent likenesses of the ones they loved. As technology changed and improved, people could be photographed outside of the professional portrait studio, creating a market for candid snapshots. Twentieth-century photographers captured the many ways people interacted with one another in public places, like city streets or in the private residences filling new American suburbs. Some noted the isolation that came with modernization, while others recorded how thousands of protestors regularly joined together to demand societal change.
Today, photographers continue to capture notions of togetherness. As the world grapples with the isolation induced by technology, Together reminds us of the power of community.
