Northlight Gallery

Northlight Gallery at the ASU Herberger Institute's School of Art is a laboratory for thinking about and experimenting with photography today to understand and actively examine its role as an experimental art medium and as mediator and shaper of reality in contemporary society. Northlight Gallery was founded on the Tempe campus by Professor Jack Stuler and MFA photo students in 1972 at a time when the medium was struggling to be recognized locally as a fine art. Now, over five decades later, photography and related digital technologies dominate contemporary art as well as our daily lives. Northlight Gallery is a center for debate, exhibition, and interpretation of photography, both historical and present-day.

Northlight houses two important historical photographic collections, the Northlight Gallery’s permanent collection and the Solari Foundation collection on long-term loan that include the works of internationally renowned artists such as Ansel Adams, Eugene Atget, Thomas Barrow, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier Bresson, Harry Callahan, Linda Connor, Van Deren Coke, Betty Hahn, Eikoh Hosoe, Mary Ellen Mark, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Paul Strand, Andy Warhol and Edward Weston. These collections offer an invaluable resource for teaching and art historical research for the ASU community and at large, to learn about analog photographic methods and printing techniques; and to examine critically and creatively the ways historical photography has shaped contemporary ways of seeing in subjects it has traditionally addressed such as landscape, gender, portraiture, the body and history, including colonial history.