clipped from www.nytimes.com

Since its 2003 survey of Thomas Struth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been getting serious about photography. In 2005 it presented a Diane Arbus retrospective and, in a stunning move, acquired more than 8,500 works by absorbing the Gilman Paper Company Collection. Last spring it offered a glimpse of video and new-media works from its holdings. (Who knew the Met even had video, let alone a David Hammons?) Now the museum has designated a gallery exclusively for the exhibition of photographs made after 1960.

The new space is certainly an improvement on the rotating photography displays located in a crowded, noisy hallway outside the modern-art wing. There, tucked between a gift shop and a bathroom, visitors could get up close (often too close for the curators’ comfort) to the large-scale works the museum had been acquiring since the department of photography was founded in 1992.