This exhibition explores the movie theater as both architectural icon and cultural form through a range of photographic practices, offering a powerful meditation on what it has meant—and continues to mean—to gather in the dark to watch stories unfold on a screen. Seeing the Cinema includes Thomas R. Schiff’s panoramic views of neighborhood movie theater exteriors; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s renowned long-exposure images of auditoriums; John Margolies’s documentation of drive-ins; and Joseph Holmes’s portraits of projectionists. Together, these four perspectives—architectural, atmospheric, environmental, and occupational—invite visitors to consider the movie theater as both a physical site and a cultural idea.
Museum of the Moving Image