Three photographers — Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Wilson, and Suda House — will have their works shown during The Museum of Photographic Arts’ celebration of its 40th Anniversary in Balboa Park.

MOPA is a standalone photographic museum in San Diego and is one of only three in the country; the other two are in New York.

The trio of exhibitions on portraiture range from the 19th century to the contemporary era. The exhibits will be public from April 6 through mid-October.

“This is a big anniversary for us,” MOPA Executive Director and Chief Curator Deborah Klochko. “We are very excited about this event and looking forward to sharing these exhibits with the public… this is a great way to look at portraiture in three very different ways over more than 100 years.” 

Photography pioneer Cameron on show

The highlight of the trio is said to be Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Arresting Beauty” (1815-1879), coming from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Cameron’s exhibit runs from April 29 to Sept. 3.

“We are especially excited about the collaboration with the V&A in London,” Klochko said. “I knew of [Cameron’s] work and always admired it, and she is one of the two most famous women in photography. I thought it was important for people to see the works.”

In addition to the exhibit, there will also be a lecture on Cameron on May 6 at 5 p.m. by lecturer Malcolm Daniel, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

With a scholarly focus on the first 75 years of the medium, Cameron has long been a figure near and dear to Daniel’s heart. She was the subject of his final exhibition at the Met in 2013 and, recently, he acquired for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the presentation album that Cameron assembled in 1869 as a thank-you gift for her daughter and son-in-law Julia and Charles Norman, who gave her her first camera as a Christmas present six years earlier.

MOPA will be the fist U.S. venue to exhibit Cameron’s collection “Arresting Beauty.” She is one of the most innovative and influential photographers of all time, according to Klochko. She pioneered close-up portraits and took photographs deliberately out of focus because she found them more beautiful that way.

Local artist Suda House

Next up, running now through Oct. 15 is “The Water Holds Me,” photographs by Suda House. It reflects 40 years of local artist House’s creative output.

The exhibit of House’s large-scale photographs showcase her journey as a woman, a mother, an artist, and an open-water ocean swimmer, each connected by a care and concern for our damaged planet.

According to House, “Over the past 40 years, the Museum of Photographic Arts has continued to reveal the global impact photography has in exposing our ever-changing climate and the struggles of our earth’s inhabitants. MOPA has been a mainstay for photographers, educators, and our community and it is an honor to exhibit my photography to further reach an audience with my message that climate change is a women’s issue.”

Her photographs of women struggling in water lure the beauty in with their beauty but are also meant to awaken a call to action to save the ocean.

“The title of the exhibition is ‘The Water Holds Me,’ it is my gift of hope for San Diego and a call to rise and protect and preserve our ocean, and more importantly to see the struggle of all women who nurture and care for our planet’s humanity. This call must make a difference now and for the future of our children,” she said. “The water still holds us, but for how long?”

Celebrity photographer Robert Wilson

Last but not least, running April 1 through Sept. 24 is “Video Portraits,” by Robert Wilson in which he had celebrities and other subjects hold a pose for hours in portraits that barely move upon close examination.

Wilson got his start in vanguard theater and is a prominent playwright and artist. He works across many mediums.

“For the most part, we shoot the work silently as I do in the theater. I am first concerned with image and movement, the sound score, music, or text is brought in in post-production after we can see the image and how it unfolds,” Wilson explained.

Wilson pulls from many different mediums and inspirations to create these videos.

“The score as the image itself comes from a variety of sources. It might come from a very old recording, a field recording, or a composer I have worked with in the theater, It might come from a video game or a text that I or someone else reads. The point is to be open, and that sound is as strong as the image – that it can stand independently if need be. The same is true for the images,” Wilson said.

Importance of MOPA

When the museum started in 1983 it was 9,000 square feet and is now 30,000 square feet. MOPA and its programs, exhibits, lectures, and more continue to be a popular place for many reasons, according to Klochko. There are also 22,000 books related to photography, lining the shelves in its library, she said.

“Photography of the medium of our time, everyone who has a cell phone has a camera and everyone takes pictures or videos, uploads, and makes images,” Klochko said.

“We are surrounded by visual images from journalists to teens posting online and on TikTok yet people are not necessarily literate about the visual image, so the importance of our museum is to address all aspects of the visual image of the photographic lens space’s visual imagery.”

The three exhibits together showcase how portraits have changed over the past 100 years. In addition to the rich diversity in the three exhibits, Klochko noted that they demonstrate not just the beauty of photography but also the power the medium has to educate.

“More people are embracing photography but embracing it without understating its history, where it came from, and the power of the visual image – even a caption in a paper can change the meaning of an image,” the curator explained.