The Met makes room for big prints

The largest art museum in the western hemisphere, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (encompassing four blocks and and totaling 2 million square feet) has found some extra space to open a photography gallery. Their inaugural installation entitled Depth of Field will showcases large scale photographs that has been part of the museum's collection for several years, but did not have a proper place to display them. The show will run from September 25th through March 23rd of 2008.

New Gallery for Modern and Contemporary Photography to be Inaugurated at Metropolitan Museum in September

The Metropolitan Museum will inaugurate the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography on September 25, 2007, establishing for the first time a gallery dedicated exclusively to photography created since 1960. With high ceilings, clean detailing, and approximately 2,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Menschel Hall is designed specifically to accommodate the large-scale photographs that are an increasingly important part of contemporary art and the Museum's permanent collection. Photographers represented in the collection include such modern masters as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Doug Aitken, and Sigmar Polke.

...During the last seven years, we have built up a following—especially among artists—with our rotating installations outside the modern art wing, but many photographs are simply too large to fit there. Now we can really show what we have been collecting," concluded Mr. Eklund.