Aaron Siskind

MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHY: 1910-1950 At: Museum of Fine Arts, through April 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org A camera is a machine as a paintbrush and chisel are not. That didn't sit well with aesthetically ambitious photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They sought the status of fine artists by suppressing their medium's technological nature. Pictorialism, as this school of photography was called, employed gauzy visual effects and genteel subject matter in the pursuit of painting by darkroom means.

A CENTURY OF PHOTOGRAVURE At the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, 700 Beacon St., through Oct. 23. 617-585-6600, www.aiboston.edu/galleries LEE FRIEDLANDER: Cherry Blossom Time in Japan At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., #37, through Oct. 15. 617-482-0411, www.gallerykayafas.com "Photography" is a somewhat misleading term. As a single word, it implies that writing with light (in Greek, "graphi" means writing and "phos" means light)

Twenty-five years ago, the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University opened its gallery space. Next year marks the 35th anniversary of the PRC’s founding. To observe those occasions, the PRC has mounted “Then/Now: Recent Work by PRC Founders Carl Chiarenza and Chris Enos.’’ The show runs through Jan. 9. Enos was the PRC’s first executive director. She now lives in New Mexico. The 10 images in “Then/Now’’ come from her “Portal’’ series. Taken over the past six years, they’re big (24 inches by 30 inches)

MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHY: 1910-1950 At: Museum of Fine Arts, through April 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org A camera is a machine as a paintbrush and chisel are not. That didn't sit well with aesthetically ambitious photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They sought the status of fine artists by suppressing their medium's technological nature. Pictorialism, as this school of photography was called, employed gauzy visual effects and genteel subject matter in the pursuit of painting by darkroom means.

CHICAGO -- From the beginning, photography has had travel as a major genre. The photographer acted as proxy, taking viewers where they could not otherwise go. It's easy to forget how important this once was, now that nearly everyone has easy access to travel, and nearly everyone who travels packs a camera (preferably, digital). I think, therefore I am? I travel, therefore I snap. Some of the great chapters in photographic history have come from journeys: Timothy O'Sullivan out West, Edward Weston in Mexico, Henri-Cartier Bresson in Spain, Walker Evans in the South, Robert Frank on the road, Diane Arbus...

Photographer Saul Leiter's New York -- a little patch of 10th Street in the middle of the 20th century -- shows up at Gallery Kayafas as a revelation. Leiter isn't a documentary photographer or social commentator, like Robert Frank. Nor is he a formalist, like Aaron Siskind. He didn't shoot New Yorkers so much as the city itself, and he did it intimately, so that a simple image -- a man's foot resting on a subway seat; a red umbrella in the snow -- feels fresh, yet utterly familiar and intrinsically New York.

FITCHBURG — Collectors come in all shapes, sizes, and currencies. That said, the genus tends to fall into two basic groups: those who accumulate and those who acquire. For accumulators, more really is more. Think of Andy Warhol’s cookie jars, or William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon. For acquirers, less is more — so long as it’s the right less. That rightness may be as much a matter of style or genre, technique or period, as quality. The important point is that the purchases fit the character of the collection rather than just fill up the warehouse.

A CENTURY OF PHOTOGRAVURE At the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, 700 Beacon St., through Oct. 23. 617-585-6600, www.aiboston.edu/galleries LEE FRIEDLANDER: Cherry Blossom Time in Japan At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., #37, through Oct. 15. 617-482-0411, www.gallerykayafas.com "Photography" is a somewhat misleading term. As a single word, it implies that writing with light (in Greek, "graphi" means writing and "phos" means light)

LINCOLN -- William Butler Yeats posed one of the most famous questions in 20th-century poetry, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Arno Rafael Minkkinen has devoted his career to offering a photographic riposte: How can we know the dancer from the dance floor? The dancer, in this case, is Minkkinen's nude body, and the dance floor the surrounding environment. That environment can be a lake or canyon or even the Bridge of Sighs. The point is that Minkkinen photographs himself in such a way as to merge with his surroundings.

NORTH ADAMS and WILLIAMSTOWN - In recent weeks, Massachusetts has witnessed an outbreak of vandalism against musical instruments on a scale not seen since the early days of punk rock. The perpetrators, wouldn't you know it, are artists - a class of people notorious for getting creation mixed up with destruction. And the results? Dazzling. First we had Radcliffe Bailey, whose powerful installation evoking the slave trade, titled "Windward Coast," at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College (through May 6)

FITCHBURG — Collectors come in all shapes, sizes, and currencies. That said, the genus tends to fall into two basic groups: those who accumulate and those who acquire. For accumulators, more really is more. Think of Andy Warhol’s cookie jars, or William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon. For acquirers, less is more — so long as it’s the right less. That rightness may be as much a matter of style or genre, technique or period, as quality. The important point is that the purchases fit the character of the collection rather than just fill up the warehouse.

Twenty-five years ago, the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University opened its gallery space. Next year marks the 35th anniversary of the PRC’s founding. To observe those occasions, the PRC has mounted “Then/Now: Recent Work by PRC Founders Carl Chiarenza and Chris Enos.’’ The show runs through Jan. 9. Enos was the PRC’s first executive director. She now lives in New Mexico. The 10 images in “Then/Now’’ come from her “Portal’’ series. Taken over the past six years, they’re big (24 inches by 30 inches)

CHICAGO -- From the beginning, photography has had travel as a major genre. The photographer acted as proxy, taking viewers where they could not otherwise go. It's easy to forget how important this once was, now that nearly everyone has easy access to travel, and nearly everyone who travels packs a camera (preferably, digital). I think, therefore I am? I travel, therefore I snap. Some of the great chapters in photographic history have come from journeys: Timothy O'Sullivan out West, Edward Weston in Mexico, Henri-Cartier Bresson in Spain, Walker Evans in the South, Robert Frank on the...

Photographer Saul Leiter's New York -- a little patch of 10th Street in the middle of the 20th century -- shows up at Gallery Kayafas as a revelation. Leiter isn't a documentary photographer or social commentator, like Robert Frank. Nor is he a formalist, like Aaron Siskind. He didn't shoot New Yorkers so much as the city itself, and he did it intimately, so that a simple image -- a man's foot resting on a subway seat; a red umbrella in the snow -- feels fresh, yet utterly familiar and intrinsically New York.

LEXINGTON -- George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak , played no small role in the history of photography. His estate, in Rochester, N.Y., now contains no small portion of that history. It's home to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. The name may be a mouthful, but Eastman House ranks with the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the Getty Museum as one of the world's great photographic repositories. The richness of the Eastman House holdings is very much apparent in "Picturing What Matters," which consists of 126 images taken from the museum's...

LINCOLN — The grounds of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is a gold mine for mushroom foragers. That’s just one thing deCordova staffers learned while the artist team of Paul Bartow and Richard Metzgar worked on a project there that melds artistic strategy with scientific methodology to create several lenses through which to view the museum, its collection, and its environment. “PLATFORM 5: Bartow + Metzgar: Stratimentation: Investigations of a Metamorphic Landscape’’ is an unwieldy title that sounds like the heading on an article in a scientific journal.