Out of the Dark Room: The David Kronn Collection

This exhibition is drawn from a collection of more than 450 photographs brought together by the Irish born American collector David Kronn. The collection ranges in content from 19th century Daguerreotypes to the 20th century photography of Edward Weston and August Sander  and works from award-winning contemporary photographers, such as the husband and wife team of Nicolai Howalt and Trine Sondergaard, and the Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi.  It is particularly strong in its representation of Harry Callahan, Kenneth Josephson, Irving Penn and Brett Weston.

IMMA’s exhibition Out of the Dark Room presents a selection of 165 works across all photographic media. It explores themes emerging through the collection like portraits of children, abstracted landscapes and portraits of artists, such as Irving Penn’s Frederick Kiesler and Willem de Kooning, New York, 1960. There are numerous iconic works, examples being Herb Ritts’s image of pop star Madonna from 1986; the portrait of Laurie Anderson by Robert Mapplethorpe from 1987; or Dr Harold Edgerton’s time-lapse photograph of a boy running from 1939. Dr Kronn is a paediatrician with a specialisation in medical genetics, a fact which underlies the many images of children in the collection – Diane Arbus’s Loser at a Diaper Derby, 1967, for instance; or Martine Franck’s images of children from Tory Island (1994-97), and Irina Davis’s poignant portraits of children in a Russian state orphanage (2006-2007).

David Kronn has made a promised gift of his collection to IMMA. This will begin with the immediate donation of a portrait of the celebrated French-born artist Louise Bourgeois by Annie Leibovitz, and will continue as an annual bequest of works each year, until his entire collection is housed in IMMA.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by IMMA that includes texts by Susan Bright, Seán Kissane, David Kronn and Carol Squiers.