Getty Museum’s ‘Engaged Observers’ exhibition wins Lucie Award, draws record crowds

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‘Engaged Observers,’ a photography exhibition currently on view at the Getty Center, has turned out to be a success for the museum in more ways than one.

On Wednesday, it was announced that the show won the Lucie Awards’ honor for curator and exhibition of the year, which is regarded as one of the top prizes in the photography world. The other finalists this year were exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center for Photography in New York.

‘Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties’ was curated by Brett Abbott and went on view at the Getty Center on June 29. The show, which is set to run through Nov. 14, features works by James Nachtwey, Leonard Freed, Larry Towell, Lauren Greenfield and a few other contemporary photographers.

The museum said Thursday that the exhibition is the most attended photography exhibition at the Getty Center to date. Total attendance to date for the show is 226,440, with a weekly average of 14,153, according to the museum.

The museum’s previous photography exhibition record holder was ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms/August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century,’ which had a combined total attendance of 220,092 and were open for 19 weeks.

Some of the photographers whose work is part of ‘Engaged Observers’ spoke to the Times on the occasion of the show’s opening.

The Lucie Awards are handed out on an annual basis and are intended to recognize achievements in the photographic medium at museums and publications.

-- David Ng

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