Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection, Museum of Modern Art, (October 31, 2025–February 16, 2026) presents more than fifty works that span the full breadth of photography’s history. Iconic, historically significant images appear alongside lesser-known, intimate moments, forming a vivid vignette of lives, places, and eras otherwise out of reach. Together, these photographs invite viewers to move across time—witnessing both the monumental and the everyday.

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

The exhibition brings together a selection of photographs that demonstrate the medium’s ability to function simultaneously as a tool and a creative force. For Julia Margaret Cameron and Edward Steichen, the camera becomes an instrument of artistic intention—used deliberately to elevate photography into the realm of art. This through line continues in the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, William Eggleston, and Cindy Sherman, as well as Man Ray. These artists use the darkroom or the camera not simply to record what is before them, but to transform it—experimenting with process, perception, and the essential properties of light itself.

Time Travelers also pairs documents of pivotal historical events—such as Hiro’s photograph of Apollo 11 and a rare image of the Wright Brothers’ early aviation experiments—with quieter scenes staged for a camera not meant merely to record, but to reveal. Works like Emmet Gowin’s tender portrait of his wife, Edith Morris, or Imogen Cunningham’s The Unmade Bed open a window into the artists’ private worlds, offering moments of profound intimacy amid the sweep of history.

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that features forty-four full-page plates and more than fifty contextualizing images.

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection

Emmet Gowin, Edith, Chincoteague, Virginia, 1967

Edward Steichen, Moonrise—Mamaroneck, New York, 1904

Herbert George Ponting, A Grotto in an Iceberg, 1911

Julia Margarget Cameron, Cyllena Wilson, July 1868

Imogen Cunningham, The Unmade Bed, 1957

Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation, August 17, 1976

Jan Groover, Untitled, c. 19

Time Travelers Front Cover