PHILADELPHIA, PA.- This spring the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents the first in a two-part series of exhibitions drawn from the range of contemporary photographs in the collection. Focusing on works from 1975 to the present, Take One includes photographers who engaged with new artistic and social trends that emerged over the last forty years as well as those who continued to work creatively within the established traditions of the medium. Ranging from Robert Adams and An-My Lê to Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, the works on view reflect a variety of approaches to photography's capacity to document, as well as to photograph subjects such as landscape and the human body.

While Robert Adams' black and white Colorado Springs, Colorado conveys an unsentimental view of the growth of suburbia in the American West, John Divola takes a different approach to the landscape in his Zuma Series: Portfolio One. Divola's color photographs depict the progressive effects of weather, fire, and the artist's own vandalism on the interior of an abandoned house in Malibu, California.

Cindy Sherman’s large-scale chromogenic print Untitled #204 from the series History Portraits addresses the relationship between photography and social reality by fabricating a persona purely to make a photograph. Her huge, ornately framed “portrait” reminds us that we live in a world where identity is shaped by pictures which ultimately refer to other pictures. Andreas Gursky also works at the large scale enabled by modern photographic technology. Gursky’s enormous, highly-detailed Bundestag represents the hall of the former German parliament building. With digital alterations that only become noticeable upon close looking, Bundestag treads a line between visual spectacle and social critique.

In addition to figures such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Judith Joy Ross,Take One includes several works by artists who are not primarily known as photographers. Panorama, 11/02/84 , a manipulated Polaroid assemblage by the artist Lucas Samaras will be on view near a work by Anselm Kiefer, whose thickly painted canvases often contain torn and tattered photographs. Works such as these will demonstrate how artists manipulated processes to yield experimental results and broke down boundaries that long separated artistic media. Photographs by earlier career artists such as Elaine Stocki, Caleb Charland, and Lucas Foglia will also be on view

Nathaniel Stein, The Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, said: “The entire gallery is treated as a terrain for exploration of the various ways photography is used in art, or conceptualized as art over the past forty years. We hope to illuminate the connections between established schools and new directions of photography embraced by the broader art world.” Take Two, the second in the two-part series, is curated by Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs and The Alfred Stieglitz Center, and will open August 22, 2015.