The Power of Photography

Art galleries and exhibitions proliferate throughout California but only a handful focus on photography. For the longest time, few curators and collectors took the medium seriously and you could pick up prints by the masters for ridiculously low prices. Even today, photography is undervalued. Power of Photography, an exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, showcases eighty prints, many of which deserve to be as well-known and respected as any modern artwork.

The exhibition is based on a book of the same name by Peter Fetterman, who has championed the art of photography for the past 40 years. Peter grew up poor in London and found escape in the arts. He came to Hollywood to produce a movie and, though that project fell short, he stayed on and developed a passion for still images. His first acquisition, a classic image by Max Yavno, cost him almost every dollar he had. Just as Larry Gagosian got his start selling posters from a stall in Westwood before becoming a master of the art universe, so did Peter have a humble start, trading photographs from the back of his jalopy. That ad hoc venture evolved into his spacious gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station.

Peter’s taste is eclectic and embraces a century of creativity, but the pictures that move him the most are those by the humanists: photographers who focus on the human condition. He has forged personal friendships with many of these, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Sebastiaõ Salgado, the Brazilian activist who has chronicled endangered tribes and the imperiled wonders of nature. The Bowers exhibition features many of his favorite images. Here are memorable portraits of Frank Lloyd Wright and Yves St Laurent , a stunning view of California route 1 as it winds through Big Sur, and a vista of Saõ Paulo where men stroll on a roof terrace high above a bustling street. 

Peter has a nostalgia for the England of his childhood and the glamor of Paris in the postwar years when French couturiers reigned supreme. Here is a surreal image by Melvin Sokolsky of a model floating in a plexi bubble above a forest and a deadpan study of a uniformed chauffeur parked in Knightsbridge with a poodle in the next seat. Cartier Bresson is represented by an intimate study of his cat, drowsing in an armchair. Max Yavno’s iconic image of a klieg-lit premiere at the long-vanished Carthay Circle Theater is a time capsule of old Hollywood.

These are a few of the highlights, but the exhibition covers a much wider range of human experience, city life and the natural world. A young Queen Elizabeth with her corgis warmed by an electric fire in the hearth—a world away from the pomp of royalty. A parade of trilbys at a fathers’ day picnic in 1948. The Beatles and Rolling Stones in their prime, Ansel Adams’ moving portrait of ragged migrant children, and two white pears framed by a dark bowl. What a world of wonders is here!

The Power of Photography runs October 7 through January 14, 2024 at the Bowers Museum, 2002 North Main Street, Santa Ana. bowers.org.