The Beauty of Lines: The Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Collection

What makes us admire a sparsely populated photograph of two bicycles by Augusto Cantamessa? Or the striking visual effect displayed by a Depression-era Walker Evans picture of a man smoking and staring out past the lens? The beauty of a great photograph lies in its lines and their power to confront the viewer visually. Throughout history, photographers have made use of photographic line in a vast variety of ways, from the “instantaneous lines” of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the rational lines of the New Topographics to the diversity of lines created by the human body.
           
Published to accompany an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, The Beauty of Lines draws on a remarkable cache of photographs in the private collection of Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla. Widely recognized as one of the world’s most important private collections, it spans the entire history of the medium and includes almost all the great artists canonized in its virtual hall of fame. Among the images reproduced here are famous masterpieces by Eugène Atget, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as works by contemporary artists, such as Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Thomas Struth. The book presents the photographs in juxtaposition with one another rather than in chronological order, offering a key to their power and inviting readers to question their individual experiences of and relationship to the images. Published alongside the images is an essay exploring the range and significance of the collection and an interview with Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla.
           
Featuring more than one hundred plates, including many in full color, The Beauty of Lines is the first book to open up and make accessible this important collection to the broader community of photographers and fans of photographic art.
 

Pauline Martin is a senior curator at Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.