This spring museums coast to coast are presenting major photography exhibitions. From contemporary studio practices [MoMA] to the rise of photography in America during the Civil War [NOMA], you can explore Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura, dig into Frida Kahlo’s archive, or dig jazz with Lee Friedlander [Yale].

Opening this week

Now You See It: Photography and Concealment

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 31–September 1, 2014
Photography usually shows the appearance of things. But it can be equally good at hiding. Drawn from the Met’s collection, this show of contemporary and vintage photography and video, including works by Vera Lutter, Taryn Simon, Diane Arbus, and Weegee, looks at what can be concealed. Information

Opening April 4

Jazz Lives: The Photographs of Lee Friedlander and Milt Hinton

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, April 4–September 7, 2014

Lee Friedlander is best known as a street photographer with an insatiable eye for the surfaces of American life, but since the 1950s he has been a serious jazz enthusiast, and photographed many of his heroes. Milt Hinton came to the same subject from the other side, a bassist who documented his long career in music using photography. This show, organized by a group of students from Yale, including musicians from the Undergraduate Jazz Collective, brings the two views together. Information.

Anthony Friedkin, Hustlers, Selma Avenue, Hollywood, from the series The Gay Essay, 1971.

Opening June 4

Anthony Friedkin: The Gay Essay

The deYoung Museum, San Francisco, June 4, 2014-January 4, 2015

A native of Los Angeles, Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949) honed his photographic skills at an early age and became a professional artist after he graduated from high school in the late 1960s. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 to 1973, Friedkin made a series of eloquent and expressive photographs that chronicle the gay communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. The Gay Essay was a self-assigned project and, although largely unknown today, it arguably comprises the most important set of photographs in Friedkin’s portfolio to date. Information.

Continuing

David Hilliard | Intimacies

Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, continuing through May 18, 2014

David Hilliard's vibrant color photographs, usually triptychs or larger compositions, present elaborate narratives exploring a range of themes and situations, from the awkwardness of adolescence to masculinity disarmed. Formally, these staged photographs share the style of contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Anna Gaskell, among others. Yet Hilliard draws less from the realm of the fantastic and instead looks to his immediate surroundings to draw inspiration, as he deftly fuses autobiography with fiction to engage a host of complex ideas. Information. 

David Hilliard, Mary Remembering, 2001.

Lucas Samaras: Offerings from a Restless Soul

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, continuing through June 1, 2014

When Lucas Samaras was given an SX-70 camera by Polaroid in 1973, he said it was “one of the greatest gifts anyone could give an artist.” Photo-Transformation (1973) is one of his early so-called Photo-Transformations, each of which is a self-portrait in some way. In the 1980s Samaras made a series called “Panoramas,” again using Polaroid film but to very different effect, as he pieced together slices of many photographs to create an 84-inch-wide view of his home—his tiny kitchen and his study filled with the ingredients of his life and implements of his art. Information.

Frida Kahlo: Her Photos

Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, continuing through June 8, 2014

Photography was important to Frida Kahlo – both her father and grandmother were photographers. Throughout her life she collected photos, including 19th-century daguerreotypes and calling cards, as well as pictures from the photo stars that passed through her social circle, such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, and Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Other pictures she treated like canvas, cutting and writing on them. On view here are 257 images from the Blue House archive, where Kahlo was born and lived in the years before she died. Information.

Michael Snow: Photo-Centric

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, continuing through April 27, 2014

Experimental filmmaker Michael Snow is best known for his rigorous movies such as Wavelength (1967), a 45-minute zoom across a mostly empty apartment. But at the core of his work is the reproduction of reality made possible by photography. Here, the Philadelphia Museum of Art devotes a show entirely to the role of the still camera in his work. Information.

Photography and the American Civil War

New Orleans Museum of Art, continuing through May 4, 2014

More than 200 of the finest and most poignant photographs of the American Civil War have been brought together for the landmark exhibition Photography and the American Civil War. Organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition examines the evolving role of the camera during the nation's bloodiest war (1861-1865) in which 750,000 lives were lost. This exhibition will explore, through photography, the full pathos of the brutal conflict that, after 150 years, still looms large in the American public's imagination. Information. Read the DART feature.

Abelardo Morell, Entrance in Gallery #171 with a De Chirico Painting, 2005; Camera Obscura. The Philadelphia Museum of Art East.

Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, continuing through May 18, 2014

Abelardo Morell’s playful and inventive approach to photography ranges from experiments in old-fashioned photo techniques, such as his cliché-verre photo-painting mash-ups, to his well-known camera obscura images. Made by turning tents or whole rooms into recording devices, his pictures make sly connections between subjects and the surfaces that record them. This show began at the Art Institute of Chicago and traveled to the Getty, but the High will debut Morell’s commission for the museum’s “Picturing the South” series. Information.

A Collective Invention: Photographs at Play

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, continuing through May 18, 2014

In the first show at the Morgan to focus on photography, images aren’t organized in a traditional pattern or overarching theme. Drawn from more than two dozen collections, each image instead relates only to those hanging on either side, but that connection changes with each picture. Including images from the worlds of science, art, and photojournalism, the show, organized by the Morgan’s first photo curator, Joel Smith, looks at the lighter ways images relate to each other.

El ojo fino / The Exquisite Eye: Contemporary Women Photographers from Mexico

Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, continuing through May 25, 2014

The nine great women photographers from Mexico represented in this exhibition combine very personal and often visionary responses to the social realities around them in images that are mysterious, beautiful, and sometimes harsh. Among them are Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, Yolanda Andrade, Alicia Ahumada, Ángeles Torrejón, and Maya Goded. Each with a camera and “exquisite eye,” these photographers share a finely tuned way of seeing the truths, visions, and enigmas of their beloved Mexico. Information.

Dayanita Singh

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, continuing through June 1, 2014

Dayanita Singh began her career as a photojournalist. Photography remains at the center of her work, which now includes book-making and the construction of portable wooden structures she calls “Museums,” which display her images in changing configurations. Among other pieces, the Art Institute will show its recently acquired construction Myself Mona Ahmed (1989-2001), which includes images of Mona Ahmed, an Indian eunuch Singh befriended while on assignment in 1989. Information.

Garry Winogrand

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, continuing through June 8, 2014

Garry Winogrand (1928 –1984), a New Yorker who roamed the United States during the postwar decades, left behind a sweeping portrait of American life. His photographs powerfully combine the hope and exhilaration as well as the anxiety and turbulence that characterized America during these vital years, revealing a country that glitters with possibility but threatens to spin out of control. Endlessly curious, Winogrand scrutinized both cities and suburbs, always on the lookout for those instants when happenstance and optics might join to make a good picture that exposes some deep current in American culture. Information. Read the DART feature. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Earliest Human Relatives, from the Dioramas series.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense

The Getty Museum, through June 8, 2014

Since the mid-1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto has used photography to investigate how visual representation interprets and distills history. This exhibition brings together three series by the artist—habitat dioramas, wax portraits, and early photographic negatives—that present objects of historical and cultural significance from various museum collections. By photographing subjects that reimagine or replicate moments from the distant past, Sugimoto critiques the medium's presumed capacity to portray history with accuracy. Information.

In the Looking Glass: Recent Daguerreotype Acquisitions

Nelson–Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, continuing through July 20, 2014

Small, made of glass, and housed in elaborate cases, daguerreotypes were the original hand-held photos. Popular for a few decades after photography’s invention in 1839, they were made without negatives—each image is unique. The Nelson-Atkins Museum’s growing collection includes more than 800. The latest additions, on view here, include romantic hand-painted examples from Europe. Information.

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio

Museum of Modern Art, New York, continuing through October 5, 2014

Some photographers shoot out in the world and wouldn’t know what to do in a studio, but for many, the control and autonomy offered by four white walls is essential. MoMA brings together new acquisitions and work from the collection to explore the ways photographers have used the studio throughout the history of photography, from the theatrical scenes of Julia Margaret Cameron to the chemical experiments of Walead Beshty.