This exhibition is selected from the wide-ranging art holdings of Bank of America, one of the largest and most comprehensive corporate collections of photography in the world. The collection was significantly influenced by scholars Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who in the late 1960s assembled a core group of photographs covering the entire history of the medium for The Exchange National Bank of Chicago, a legacy Bank of America institution.

Among the artists represented are Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Tina Barney, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Vera Lutter, Vik Muniz, Richard Misrach, Stéphane Couturier, and Alec Soth.

“Conversations” features portraits, still lifes, landscapes, documentary images, and experimental abstractions by more than 100 different artists, grouped thematically to create visual “conversations.” Nineteenth-century works are compared with modern, European juxtaposed with American, close-ups paired with distant views, and staged subjects alongside documentary.

Enjoy spending time with these memorable and thought-provoking images and then be inspired to come up with conversations of your own.

ABOVE LEFT: Lee Friedlander, T.V. in Hotel Room, Galax, Virginia, 1962. Gelatin silver print. Bank of America Photography Collection. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

ABOvE RIGHT: William Eggleston, Untitled (Memphis), about 1970. Dye transfer print. Bank of America Photography Collection. © Eggleston Artistic Trust, Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.