This exhibition selects from over a thousand photographs that were accepted as gifts in the last three years, leading up to the recent merging of the Museum of Photographic Arts and The San Diego Museum of Art. This combined collection now contains over fifteen thousand works of photography, video, and new media. From anonymous nineteenth-century photographers to renowned artists such as Berenice Abbott, Martín Chambi, Mary Ellen Mark, Arnold Newman, Alison Rositer, Aaron Siskind, Mike and Doug Starn, Louise Dahl Wolfe, and many more, the photographs presented here reflect a diverse range of processes spanning nearly two hundred years. Picture This: Recent Acquisitions is organized into three sections: Portraiture, Abstraction/Manipulation, and Modernism.

Picture This demonstrates that a photograph is truly worth a thousand words. Sharing the work and the stories that each provide is a vital part of the nature of collecting. This exhibition looks specifically at the most recent acquisitions to the collection, the majority of which were gifted by local collectors or by the artists themselves. In particular, the Museum is grateful for the ongoing generosity of Cam and Wanda Garner, Ken and Jacki Widder, and Forrest D. Colburn. Two significant gifts were bequests, one from Lawrence S. Friedman and the other from Jerry D. Gardner.

By learning about the maker along with their influences and motivations, a deeper understanding can be experienced. It was Aristotle who wrote, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” The core of the Picture This exhibition is to share the humanistic power of photography in all of its facets.