Former name | Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts |
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Established | 2001 |
Location | 1630 E 7th Avenue Ybor, Tampa FL, 33605 |
Type | Photography Museum |
Website | www.fmopa.org |
The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA) is a museum dedicated to exhibiting important photographic art as central to contemporary life and culture. FMoPA also enriches the community by operating outreach programs to educate children and adults. FMoPA is one of fewer than ten museums in the United States dedicated exclusively to photography and one of two such museums in Florida. In addition, the museum is home to high-impact community programs such as the Children's Literacy Through Photography program for at-risk children and adult photography classes, workshops, and children's summer camps. Following the museum's move in 2023, FMoPA is now situated in historic Ybor City, promising growth and a new, dynamic environment to showcase its extensive collection and host exhibitions from acclaimed photographers.
Prior to being renamed the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in the summer of 2006, FMoPA was named the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts. [1]
The photographic works in the growing permanent collection include an entire suite of Harold Edgerton's landmark works using his invention, the strobe light. Also in the collection are Len Prince's celebrity portraits, a notable Dorothea Lange, a portrait of Ansel Adams by Judy Dater, scenes of Pittsburgh by Charles "Teenie" Harris and a body of work by Dianora Niccolini, a pioneer in the photographing of the male nude. The female nude is well represented in a work by Ruth Bernhard. Burk Uzzle's iconic Woodstock scenes as well as Bud Lee's unforgettable views of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture document important moments in American history. More historical moments are found in an expanding collection of panoramic (or "Cirkut") photographs taken in the early 20th century, including views of the construction of the Panama Canal and of early Tampa history.
The Florida Museum of Photographic art is currently partnered with Arts Council of Hillsborough County, the University of Tampa, and the Tampa Bay Times Forum. The Arts Council helps promote the museum and provides funds to support the museum and all its work. The University of Tampa works with the museum to support their Cultural Outreach Partners program. The program encourages students from the university to visit the museum and appreciate the art by providing free access to the art venues.
The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts has a blog on their official website with articles about museum exhibitions, upcoming events, artists, and the importance of photography.
The museum has many outreach programs such as a collaboration with the Girl Scouts, working with the Little Kids, Big Minds children's program, and a photography benefit sale. They have many collaborations with organizations such as the Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture and the Arts, Hillsborough County Public Library, the Smithsonian, Wellness and Community, and the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The museum offers a multitude of classes on different types of photography such as, analog photography, basic photography, creative photography, photographs of people and places, product photography, and smartphone and social media.
The museum offers two online exhibitions, the Veterans Exhibition and the 10th Annual International Photography Competition. For the Veterans Exhibition the museum worked with Hillsborough County Public Library to show photographs showing the experience of veterans who have returned to civilian life. The exhibition is to help with the healing process of the veterans. The second exhibition, the 10th Annual International Photography Competition, showcases. Many different types of art and a competition was conducted to name the winner in each category. Some of the categories included were still life, people/portraits, places/landscapes/drones, and abstract photography.
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Jerry Norman Uelsmann was an American photographer.
Anna Jacoba Westra, known as Ans Westra, was a Dutch-born New Zealand photographer, well known for her depictions of Māori life in the 20th century. Her prominence as an artist was amplified by her controversial 1964 children's book Washday at the Pa.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is an American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer based in New York City. The majority of his work is shot in large format.
Dianora Niccolini is a fine art photographer known for her photography of the male nude. She was President of Professional Women Photographers (PWP) from 1979 until 1984.
Zoe Strauss is an American photographer and a nominee member of Magnum Photos. She uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Curator Peter Barberie identifies her as a street photographer, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, and has said "the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art."
The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, also known as MOCA Jacksonville, is a contemporary art museum in Jacksonville, Florida, funded and operated as a "cultural institute" of the University of North Florida. One of the largest contemporary art institutions in the Southeastern United States, it presents exhibitions by international, national and regional artists.
Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
Mario Algaze was a Cuban-American photographer who photographed musicians and celebrities, in rural and urban areas, throughout Latin America.
Carol Henry is an American fine art photographer and curator.
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz is a stateside Puerto Rican photographer. He is best known for his social documentary photography of people's living conditions in less developed nations. Rivera-Ortiz lives in Rochester, New York and in Zurich.
Roger Camp is a photographer, poet and educator. Initially self-taught, he began photographing in earnest on a transcontinental bicycle trip he planned and executed at age 15 (1961). Accompanied by his twin brother, Roderic Ai Camp, the political scientist, they rode from Orange, California to Dayton, Ohio and the following year to Victoria, B.C., Canada. The trips are chronicled in a two-part article in The American Geographical Society's Focus.
Stephen Wilkes is an American photographer, photojournalist, director and fine artist.
Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.
Alexey Viktorovich Titarenko is a Soviet Union-born American photographer and artist. He lives and works in New York City.
Herb Snitzer was an American photographer who photographed jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. He lived in St. Petersburg, Florida and opened his own gallery in 2014. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Museum of Fine Arts and the William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum.
John P. Jacob is an American curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela, graduated from the Collegiate School (1975) in New York City, and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic (1981) and an MA in art history from Indiana University (1994).
Austin Irving is an American contemporary artist and photographer.
Frank Hunter is an American documentary and fine-art photographer and university educator. He is known for his photographic landscapes and his mastery of the platinum/palladium process. His interest in photographic processes includes the technical process of exposure and development as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of creating photographic work. "Hunter has always been famed for transforming the utterly familiar to something rich and strange."
Hoda Afshar is an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian government. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is held in many permanent collections across Australia.