https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3560-6179
Abstract
Framing the Field is the first project of its kind devoted to recording, making public and interpreting untold histories of the institutional formation of the field of photography in the USA from the 1970s through the 1990s. Built upon oral histories with five curators of photography in museums – Sarah Greenough, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sandra S. Phillips, Anne Wilkes Tucker and Deborah Willis – Framing the Field analyses the interconnectivity of key structuring issues, including class, gender, geography, institutions, race and relationships, to reconsider how unrecognised cultural factors have informed the popular and scholarly understanding of photography today. It gestures to the depth and breadth of these curators’ contributions while revealing an expanded history that goes well beyond their individual careers, offering both essential documentation and an alternative framing of the formation of the field. This issue of History of Photography features the first publication of excerpts from the oral histories, paired with critical responses by Molly Kalkstein, Emilia Mickevicius, Anni Pullagura, Audrey Sands and Delphine Sims. A capstone article about Nancy Newhall by Kate Palmer Albers provides a broader contextualisation of the historical period under examination. The journal offers the opportunity to bring together intergenerational perspectives on the intersection of museums and photography.
Framing What?
In 1970, photography hovered at the periphery of the contemporary art world in the USA: a handful of museums collected photographs and even fewer exhibited them with regularity; auction houses and galleries did not typically sell photographic prints; and photographers – and the occasional print curator – were often the only people who wrote or read about the medium. By the 1990s, photography was at the centre of vigorous and dynamic artistic innovation and critical debate, in both academic and popular forums, with a flourishing market, an array of publishing avenues, an expanded range of university courses offered on the subject and an increasingly prominent presence in museums of all sizes around the country. This incredible burst of activity occurred rapidly and within what was still a relatively small community, with a cadre of passionate leaders operating with the kind of autonomy that comes from being under the radar of financial support and public attention alike. The ‘photo boom’, as it has often been called, materialised in this period in the intertwined expansion of photography within academic institutions as a study of both history and practice, collecting institutions, the field of publishing and the art market, as well as the theoretical orientation of art-making practices that engaged with the conceptual and material opportunities the medium afforded.Footnote1
Framing the Field, the project around which this special issue is focused, is a collaboration between Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt that examines this historical period through the roles and professional experiences of five curators who helped shape it: Sarah Greenough (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Maria Morris Hambourg (Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], New York and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Sandra S. Phillips (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA]), Anne Wilkes Tucker (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Deborah Willis (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library [Schomburg Center] and Center for African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC). These curators began their professional lives amidst the commercial ‘photo boom’ and nascent acceptance of the medium in museums, universities and critical literature. Decades later, we can read their impact on the very concept of ‘the field of photography’, in the exhibitions they curated, the histories they wrote, the recognition of photographers they championed and the varied ways photography is studied and practised today. Framing the Field sketches a map of the field in its formative years, tracing how people moved around the country laying the foundation for the public understanding and appreciation of photography. Whether or not one views the museumification of photography as productive or problematic, this project provides a jumping off point for examining the field in relation to institutional histories of photography.
The field that we are framing is a constellated network that formed in a particular time and place, one with a burgeoning sense of self-awareness. At the beginning of this interstitial period, a small group of individuals and institutions were focused on the medium, an insular enough community where everyone felt they more or less knew each other. Curators might have honed their professional skills by training in the same couple of museum departments before dispersing their knowledge and passion for photography by building new collections and audiences in a wide variety of institutions and locales – an endeavour that was undertaken in collegial dialogue with each other. The narrative about the institutionalisation of photography that unfolds from this project thus decentres New York, and MoMA in particular, as the ‘judgment seat’ of photography,Footnote2 albeit while attending particularly to the USA. The decision to set this geographic limit reflects the fact that US museums are often perceived as having been leaders among their peer institutions in Europe and the UK in the establishment of photography in this historical period.Footnote3
In the final decades of the twentieth century, collections and departments dedicated to photography proliferated around the country. The project is thus likewise temporally bound between the prior formation of inaugural photography collections in US museums and the proliferation of departments of photography in arts institutions internationally. Libraries, of course, were also already collecting photographs before the 1970s, and the different practices of different kinds of collecting institutions is another facet of the field explored in this project. Our focus is on the 1970s through 1990s, and does not include the careers of these curators subsequent to 2001.
Built upon long-form interviews with each of the five curators, Framing the Field explores central issues that impacted them across their disparate careers and institutions, and the means by which they worked through them – building collections and audiences, developing exhibitions and projects, working with artists, colleagues and institutional leadership, mentoring and being mentored and so forth – peeling back the often invisible layers and mechanisms of curatorial work. Weaving together their firsthand accounts, Framing the Field analyses the interconnectivity of key structuring issues, issues that include class, gender, geography, institutions, race and relationships, to reconsider how unrecognised cultural factors have informed the popular and scholarly understanding of photography today. It relates a narrative that gestures to the depth and breadth of these curators’ contributions while revealing an expanded history that goes well beyond their individual careers, offering both essential documentation and an alternative framing of the formation of the field.
There is danger in highlighting the working lives of a certain group of women over others. It risks inadvertently casting them as a squad, an intentional collective of colleagues, or suggesting that their work be elevated singularly above their peers. Our hope is to skirt both dangers in favour of emphasising the interconnectivity of the networks of photography and museums in which these five individuals moved. That movement, from hometown to professional training to the museum, was the result of their personal choices and efforts, the support of many and the opportunities afforded by circumstance. Greenough, Hambourg, Phillips, Tucker and Willis were selected because their careers run concurrently, working with a focus on the dense microcosms of their institutions and geographic regions, but also with a common goal of ensconcing photographs as fine art in museums and art history.
Although operating largely independent of each other, each of their paths and stories have intersected at various points over the course of their careers. Each of the five curators shared professional relationships with men who cultivated the field of photography in its early days. Tucker studied with Beaumont Newhall at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) and the George Eastman House (today George Eastman Museum), and a few years later Greenough did her graduate work with him at the University of New Mexico. The MoMA print room was a shared space of cultivation in the 1970s and 1980s. Tucker and Hambourg started there as interns, Willis looked to the ways curator John Szarkowski ran the department when establishing operations at the Schomburg Center and Phillips collaborated with Szarkowski early in her career. The VSW and its founder Nathan Lyons in Rochester, NY, served as another incubator. Tucker earned her MA at VSW, Willis visited as often as she could and all five followed publications out of Rochester including Exposure, Image and Afterimage. In addition to being aware of each other’s exhibitions and acquisitions, they crossed paths at art fairs such as those of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, portfolio reviews held at festivals such as Houston’s FotoFest and annual conferences like those of the Society for Photographic Education, College Art Association or Oracle, the annual meeting of curators of photography.
These curators also all moved through these networks and spaces as women. They were in school when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and each engaged with the movements for rights, representation and peace fomented during the 1970s through 1990s, in different ways. A few of them chafed at the idea of being singled out for this project based on their gender identity, viewing the acknowledgement of their gender as a limitation or as a pigeonholing of their work as individuals. Still, it is hard to ignore that the labour of this sustaining generation of museum curators was largely accomplished by women-identified individuals working during a period of radical change in society’s orientation to identity. Curatorial labour, as defined by this generation, is self-effacing; to be a curator is to put the care of objects, their makers and their contexts ahead of oneself. Further, women-identified and Black-identified curators simultaneously grapple with histories obscuring the significance of their labours of care. The presence of the politics of identity in the working lives of these curators remains, regardless of their personal acknowledgement or awareness of it. Each of them accomplished major career milestones while also raising children, caring for relatives and nurturing partnerships. Recognition of these additional labours of care rarely occur in histories of their male colleagues; nevertheless, the gendered pressure on women to manage work across spheres persisted throughout their curatorial careers.
The recorded interview is a format that allows each woman to recount the nuances of her working life in her own words. Pappas and Zelt recorded oral histories with each curator in 2022. Over the course of multiple days together they traversed topics that spanned their professional lives, covering questions related to their training as historians and in some cases as photographers, issues of mentorship, challenges in making a place for themselves and for the medium of photography in museums early in their careers, failures and successes, among many other topics. The full Framing the Field archive reaches almost forty-nine hours of audio or more than 1,600 pages of transcript, and forms the foundation of a book manuscript under development by Pappas and Zelt.
Framing the Special Issue
What follows is a teaser – this issue offers a first glimpse into those conversations. A short excerpt from each interview is bracketed by a brief biography of that curator and a critical response article. Rather than gesturing to the breadth of the curator’s career, each excerpt focuses on specific topic areas determined by the respondent’s research interests. The transcripts reproduced here showcase a range of questions that can be asked of the archive, and of the field of photography in the 1970s to 1990s. The critical responses are all authored by woman-identified curators and scholars of photography who are early in their careers. What results is a conversation across generations.
In her response to Hambourg’s excerpt, Delphine Sims opts to consider the intensity of focus and drive as means by which a curator might move through and craft a history of photography. In contrast, Emilia Mickevicius responds to the ways Phillips’s intuitive process persisted across her long career at SFMOMA. Willis’s career as a curator is likewise long, but takes a different shape across various institutions, and Anni Pullagura reflects this multifaceted form by composing a litany of ruminations which move through some of the specific ways Willis developed her curatorial practice in relation to the idea of archive. Molly Kalkstein is similarly interested in phases of development – the intertwined maturation of photography markets and museum departments – in her approach to Tucker’s excerpt. Through her engagement with Tucker’s stories, Kalkstein shows how a burgeoning market for photography produced knowledge and cultivated early scholarship in museums. Rather than markets, Audrey Sands shifts focus to the rhetoric of museums and nation. She interrogates the ways museums produced and responded to national knowledge-building projects in her analysis of Greenough’s language of photography. The women’s words are the foundation for each of the respondent’s scholarly interests.
Finally, this issue’s capstone article, authored by Kate Palmer Albers, situates these intergenerational discourses between interviewed-curator and respondent-curator in relation to the voice of a photography curator from the prior generation – Nancy Newhall. In her analysis of personal correspondence and writings, Albers proves that Newhall’s distinct voice shaped the ways photography was positioned as a creative practice by institutions from the 1940s to 1970s. Rather than posing Greenough, Hambourg, Phillips, Tucker and Willis – or Kalkstein, Mickevicius, Pullagura, Sands and Sims – in a distinct lineage derived from Newhall, Albers’s article argues for the centrality of women’s words in the construction of the networks and spaces that have cultivated photography as we know it.
Greenough, Hambourg, Phillips, Tucker and Willis edited their own excerpts for context and clarity, and each chose to do so in a different manner. Some prioritised adhering more closely to the original conversational form, while others endeavoured to make writerly clarifications. All of the excerpts reflect the general flow of subjects and stories as they were covered in the raw-format interviews. A few final nota bene for reading the excerpts: the editors have provided informational footnotes throughout to identify individuals and exhibitions referenced but not otherwise defined in the text or who may not be well known. Please note that we have not provided this kind of identifying information for artists.
The collaborative approach to scholarship modelled in this issue and through Framing the Field is a method derived from feminist art historical practice. It is the way that we choose to challenge singular histories of the medium, address the occlusion of women’s work and scholarship from the history of photography, and approach museums themselves as agents that inform and maintain the shape of that history. Bringing transparency to the formation of a dominant historical narrative and its institutional parameters in this way is particularly necessary in a moment in which museums are reckoning with their inherent power as it impacts the objects they hold and audiences they engage. This issue of History of Photography is our first effort to bring the scholarly investments of the Framing the Field archive into the historiographic conversation.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, we would like to express our gratitude for the trust of our five participating curators and their willingness to join us in generating this historical archive: Sarah Greenough, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sandra S. Phillips, Anne Wilkes Tucker and Deborah Willis. The interviews they granted us demanded not only a significant amount of time, but sustained effort to plumb the depths of memory across the decades, and a spirit of generosity to accept the vulnerability of laying open one’s scholarly and professional development for others to learn from. This project would not exist without their formative work, both in their curatorial careers and in the production of these oral histories.
Likewise, the production of the interviews, and of this special issue, would not have been possible without the financial and intellectual support of a number of organisations and individuals. Grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation enabled us to undertake every element of this project to date. The Visual Studies Workshop and the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin provided us with institutional frameworks from which to conduct this work, and the Voices in Contemporary Art Artist Interview Workshop provided us with the tools to do justice to the opportunity we had in producing the interviews. We would also like to thank Sarah Meister, Douglas Nickel and Cherise Smith for their continued advice and cheerleading as this project has developed from an idea to its initial material realisation in the publication of this special issue.
Notes
1 – Various critics and scholars have analysed the ‘photo boom’ since the 1970s, including a number who have offered something of an inside perspective on the transformations that occurred in the field. See for example A. D. Coleman, Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979–1989 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1996); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, with Photographs by Louise Lawler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993); and Andy Grundberg, How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
2 – Christopher Phillips famously christened the MoMA department under John Szarkowski’s tenure with this epithet, in an article on the role of that museum as an arbiter of value during the ‘photo boom’. Christopher Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, October, 22 (Autumn 1982), 27–63.
3 – Zelt spent a year researching perceptions of the significance of the USA in the making of the field of photography in Europe and the UK, which clearly indicated a significant admiration of the institutions established for photography in the USA during the 1970s to 1990s. Obviously, this was not exclusively the case. For further information on the international context for the institutionalisation of photography in this period, see Alexandra Moschovi, A Gust of Photo-Philia: Photography in the Art Museum (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020).