Cloud Album

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Gustave Le Gray, "The Brig, Normandy," 1856

Cloud Album is a new exhibition that celebrates the breadth and beauty of clouds, a subject that has long captured the imagination of photographers, artists, and scientists. Cloud Album features more than 250 historically and culturally significant works drawn from the collection of the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC), an organization dedicated to the preservation of vernacular photographs, artifacts, and ephemera. Works in the exhibition span some of photography’s earliest images through to modern-day satellite photos.

“Clouds went from being impossible to shoot at the dawn of photography, to becoming one of the most photographed subjects today,” says AMC’s Luce Lebart, co-curator of the exhibition with Timothy Prus. “Even when it was technically difficult to render clouds in photographs, people were devoted to capturing the sky and its many manifestations. For Cloud Album we assembled images produced over a century and a half by artists and photographers using increasingly sophisticated techniques. Through this we discovered stories both small and epic arising from a shared fascination and curiosity about the sky above us.”

The exhibition includes early experiments depicting clouds by photo pioneers like Gustave Le Gray; pre- photographic cloud studies by the great British landscape painter John Constable; exciting and previously unknown works unearthed through research into the history of meteorology; images by aviators and artists in flight; snapshots of cataclysmic mushroom clouds from atomic bomb tests; and views from Apollo 9 of a large storm system.

The title Cloud Album refers to a stunning scientific album that will also be on view. Initiated by Belgian meteorologist Jean Vincent in 1894, it is equal parts scientific record and family album to which hobbyists and professionals alike have contributed. This living document reflects the efforts of more than a century of successive generations of meteorologists, each as fascinated as the next by the ephemeral phenomenon of clouds.

Public programming related to the exhibition includes Kid First Saturdays, a day of artmaking for families that takes place on the first Saturday of every month; guided tours every Thursday and Saturday; and digital offerings, which will be announced closer to the opening of the exhibition.

Cloud Album is a featured exhibition of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival, which runs from April 1 to 29, 2022.