It is impossible to know what is being taught in American high schools these days, but I hope they still teach photography classes in dark rooms, and that under those red lights students make pinhole cameras. Phone cameras and Instagram have made photography a priority these years, but taking a photo with your hands can change the way you see everything. The first photo I took this way was a close-up of a brick wall near a goth student smoking area. I didn’t smoke at the time and wasn’t sure it would work. The result looked like the face of another planet. It was blurry and mixed in unexpected but fascinating ways.
The art of Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) is often concerned with similar games of light and texture, and her new exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “still and moving • tactile image,” uses her practice in a way that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the forbidden categories of the institution. In this exhibition, Hamilton used a hand-held scanner to provide a new perspective on a group of items in the Cleveland Museum’s collection that are rarely on display: figurative pottery and nursery figures from the 1300s-1800s.
The resulting installation blows these objects into wall-sized prints. Being from New York, I want to say that they remind me of the wheat-pasted fashion ads you see in some places with these dolls trying too hard to look cool. What is true for anyone is that they have unusual clothes and a contradictory combination of the city model of long distance intimacy. We’ve never seen these things before and never will again, but the scale and surfaces are so strange that we’re not even sure what we’re looking at or how the image was created. These are old works that feel old thanks to the old ones on paper, but the handling feels new. These hanging works resemble unusual tapestries from foreign culture.
The exhibition catalog reminds us that although Hamilton did this with a camera, the word “photographs” is derived from a Greek word that translates to painting with light, and the book quotes an email from when he was working on a project that sounds like he was photographing a subject in a sense: “the process of making is one of rotating/setting—transforming—retransforming/starting to turn/starting to turn/turning its shape/over and over.” The catalog also features miniatures of his selections, from China, France, Germany and Italy. I appreciate the extent to which not much can be said about these originals, although they are interesting and beautiful enough for their catalog. Instead, they are offered to Hamilton’s vision, allowing them to speak for themselves and for us to ponder the other wonders that may be hidden within the walls of the Cleveland Museum.
“Ann Hamilton: still and moving • moving image” is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art until April 19, 2026.
More show updates
