GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT.- The major summer exhibition, Picture Perfect: Masterworks of Photography from the Hochberg-Mattis Collection, on view through September 11, 2005, at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, features selections from one of the most comprehensive and important private collections of vintage photography in the United States. The exhibition is generously underwritten by Citigroup Private Bank and The Lebensfeld Foundation.

The collection has been assembled by Michael Mattis and his wife Judith Hochberg, who readily concede that they have “an obsession/passion” for collecting photography. The couple began amassing works during their graduate school years in the early 1980s, prowling Butterfield’s auction house in San Francisco in the days when an Ansel Adams print cost a mere $500. Mattis, until recently a particle physicist who worked for the government’s Los Alamos laboratory, and his wife Judy Hochberg, a linguist and teacher, jokingly admit that their buying then went “completely out of control” as their collection grew to many thousands of prints.

The focus of the Mattis-Hochberg collection is “vintage” photography, in which the print quality (the picture making) is as important as the image (the picture taking). The couple’s extensive holdings have prompted ARTnews to name them among the top 25 photography collectors in the world based on their level of activity, the degree of their commitment, and the time and energy they spend. The May/June 2005 issue of American Photo features Mattis as one of the “100 VIPs in Photography.”

Though the couple’s initial focus was twentieth-century photography, the collection now covers photography from its inception in 1839 to approximately 1980. The exhibition will include rare - even unique - early work, such as the negative/positive pair of images from 1842 by William Henry Fox Talbot (the co-inventor of photography) of Sir David Brewster with Talbot’s microscope, as well as signature images and previously unseen masterpieces by world-renowned photographers. Mattis and Hochberg have assembled one of the most valued collections of the work of Edward Weston and have recently published, from their holdings, the most sumptuously reproduced Weston monograph, entitled Edward Weston: Life Work.

The exhibition will highlight 19th-century British photography by Hill and Adamson, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron; early French photography by Charles Nègre, Charles Marville, Félix Nadar, Gustave Le Gray and Edouard-Denis Baldus; and early American photography by Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, John Hillers, and Thomas Eakins.

There will be outstanding 19th-century travel photography, including Robert MacPherson’s images of Rome, and Capt. Linneaus Tripe’s of India. There will also be a case of daguerreotypes, the first photographic technique, as well as a case of backlit negatives of many different types.

The Mattis-Hochberg collection is strong in the work of the American Photo-Secession, a group of pictorial photographers formed in 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz and championed in his magazine Camera Work (1903-1917) and at the ‘little galleries’ of the Photo-Secession (1905-1917) at 291 Fifth Avenue. The exhibition will feature work by Stieglitz, himself an expert photographer, as well as Photo-Secessionists Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier. Additional selections from the 20th century will include the f/64 photographers, including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. European Modernism will be highlighted with the work of André Kertesz, Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Man Ray. Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s will include Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others. There will be a selection of photojournalism, including the iconic image by Alfred Eisenstadt of a couple ecstatically kissing in Times Square on VJ Day. Finally, an outstanding grouping of prints by Robert Frank, Diane Arbus (whose work is being featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring), Irving Penn, and Robert Mapplethorpe will round out the show.