Funny Business: Photography and Humor

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Spanning nearly the entire history of the medium, Funny Business: Photography and Humor offers a compelling view into the ways artists have utilized visual humor not only to provoke laughter and delight, but also as a means of resistance, an antidote to the heaviness of the world, and a way to interrogate and subvert norms and hierarchies.

Drawn primarily from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the exhibition presents 70 photographs that showcase the mechanics of photographic humor, while examining the reasons for which artists throughout time have employed it as a strategy in their work. Featured artists include Liz Cohen, Steffi Faircloth, Jeff Mermelstein, Bucky Miller, Reynier Leyva Novo, among others.

Bucky Miller, Lucy, 2024. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist © Bucky Miller

Funny Business is arranged in four thematic sections. All the World’s a Stage highlights slapstick and observational comedy through a constellation of early 20th-century gelatin silver prints and snapshots displayed in conversation with examples of canonical mid-20th century street photography. Inside Jokes charts the medium’s evolution in the 1970s, when art institutions began accepting and exhibiting photography as a legitimate art form. Featured works highlight photographers’ adoption of a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward their predecessors and the conventions and aesthetics of the medium itself. Context is Everything explores how subjects and photographic images can become absurd, ironic, and nonsensical when shown outside of their original contexts or in unexpected juxtaposition with one another. Comic Relief features the work of contemporary artists who use humor in a critical or subversive manner to explore issues of identity and belonging, politics, and general dimensions of contemporary life. Humor operates in their work as a means of resistance, a coping mechanism, a refusal to become cynical, or a way to subvert power structures and challenge stereotypes.

Jo Ann Callis, Parrot and Sailboat, 1980, 1980. Dye transfer print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Purchase, 86.16.5. © Jo Ann Callis

Header: John Pfahl, Nine Desert Snowballs, Hell’s Half Acre, Wyoming, 1977, 1977 (detail). Dye transfer print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Gift of Carol and Arthur Goldberg, 83.117.25. © John Pfahl