Martin Karplus: Moments and Monuments

September 2–December 7, 2025 | Monan Gallery

Click thumbnails to view selected objects in exhibition

This exhibition presents more than fifty digital prints of photographs taken by Martin Karplus during his travels across Europe and the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. These images reflect Karplus’s remarkable eye for color and composition, offering a window into the post-war world as seen by a deeply humanistic and inquisitive mind. The photographs capture scenes that are both timeless and fleeting.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Karplus emigrated to the United States with his family in 1938. He studied chemistry and physics at Harvard and completed his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1953. Karplus began developing his photographic skills later that year during his postdoctoral studies in Oxford, traveling throughout the UK and Continental Europe, shooting in Kodachrome slide film. Though he had no plans to exhibit his work at the time, his innate sense of color and composition, and his curiosity about people and places, produced a body of work rich in charm and depth. In the years that followed, he continued taking pictures while building an illustrious career in theoretical chemistry that would be recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2013. 

Shortly before his death in 2024, Karplus and his wife, Marci, made a significant gift of 134 digital prints to the McMullen Museum of works from the first two decades of his photographic practice. These include some of his earliest surviving images from Oxford and London, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the then-newly formed Republic of Yugoslavia. A second group of works documents his travels across the Americas, with vivid images from the Southwestern United States, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil.

Organized by the McMullen Museum, Martin Karplus: Moments and Monuments has been curated by John McCoy. Major support has been provided by Boston College and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum.