On view from November 15, 2024 - March 16, 2025
Drawn from the Milwaukee Art Museum’s photography and media arts collection, True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media explores ways that photographers and artists have understood and wielded the power of images to convey the events of our world. The exhibition calls for audiences to pay attention to an image’s context and consider its creator’s motivations, highlighting photography’s nuances and the significance of media literacy.
True Story presents more than 100 objects—photographs, magazines, collages, and a film—in three parts. Beginning the exhibition, “One Small Frame” is a section devoted to single images from the history of photojournalism. Hung chronologically, each image captures a news story in its entirety. “A Unified Thread” presents the work of photojournalists who—whether pursuing their own interests or working on assignment—used multiple images to create the narratives of the news they covered. The artists featured in “Media Messages” reflect on and critique the role photographic images play in the media landscape at large.
True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media includes works by Lewis Hine, Danny Lyon, Wayne Miller, Larry Burrows, Bruce Conner, and Taryn Simon, among many others, and was curated by Ariel Pate, assistant curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
