In an advert dated 1916, studio photographer FD Hampson arranges five Panama hats in a 2-1-2 formation. A small shower of white objects against a black background, the hats appear like flying saucers hovering in a blank void. ‘It’s a total transformation that makes the hats sing,’ suggests Virginia McBride, a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator of the recently opened exhibition, ‘The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography’, in which Hampson’s photograph features. ‘Immediately, it summoned for me the work of people like Max Ernst,’ she continues, alluding to the Dada pioneer’s The Hat Makes the Man collage from 1920.
Comprised of more than 60 works from the first century of photo advertising (beginning in the 1850s), the images in the exhibition were pulled solely from the Met’s own collection in New York – a constraint that helped set parameters says McBride, noting that it is not a complete history of commercial photography – and most of the pieces have rarely been publicly exhibited. The curator was keen to rectify this, she says, and moreover she was curious to unpack their role in shaping the visual language of modernism, as the show endeavours to do.
