Beginning with the purchase of a photograph by Eugène Atget in the 1970s, New York collector Sondra Gilman has built a powerful and varied collection of hundreds of images. The exhibition, drawn from that collection, includes the work of recognized masters of modernism as well as that of artists challenging modernist ideals. Gathered from many different sources over twenty-five years, these works, each chosen for the response they evoke in the collector, now exist in the context of Gilman's very personal vision.

Gilman's collection contains many works by artists who aspired to the traditional ideal of the photograph as an aesthetic medium as well as a medium with the unique ability to record the truth. Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham, and Harry Callahan make formal statements. Jacques-Henri Lartigue and André Kertész seek to capture a decisive moment in time, while W. Eugene Smith, Lewis Hine, and Danny Lyon use the photograph to document social conditions. The exhibition combines the work of these and other artists who embrace the idea that photographs can reveal truths, capture time, and document reality with that of photographers who question that idea. Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Levinthal create works which reveal artifice, stage narratives, and explore questions of identity and ideology. The idea of the photograph as revelation or truth is challenged by the premise that it conceals more than it reveals.

The works in A Collector's View are organized into five thematic sections. The Divided Self explores the idea that photographs can reveal facets of the self as well as consciously deny revelation. The photographs in Marking Time are concerned with the many notions of time, from the eternal to the momentary. The works in Picturing Pictures are linked in their framing and depiction of other images. Uncommon Familiar explores the capacity of the photographer to transform a seemingly ordinary subject into the extraordinary, and the images in Telling Tales offer narratives or encourage viewers to develop their own narratives. 

These themes are not intended to define the photographs in the exhibition but rather to suggest avenues for investigation. Many works seem to fit more than one theme, and works by individual artists appear in different groupings. The themes challenge viewers to be aware of how context and the experience they bring to a photograph shape its meaning. 

This exhibition was curated by Adam D. Weinberg, curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was organized by the South Texas Institute for the Arts, Corpus Christi.