THE Q&A: CURATORS OF "PICTURES BY WOMEN"

“Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art through March 2011, presents photography’s 170-year history through the lens of its female practitioners. Viewers are led through six chronologically curated galleries; one enters in 1850, traces the medium’s developments and finishes in the present. The show includes 200 works by 120 women artists of vastly different renown and practice culled from the museum’s private collection. Mostly forgotten photographers of historical import are shown next to some of the most famous artists of the 20th century. The scale is striking, the scope stunning. The exhibition’s curators—Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister and Eva Respini—spoke with More Intelligent Life about their curatorial vision.

More Intelligent Life: Was it obvious from the beginning that the exhibition would be arranged chronologically? Did you work this way, seeking out earlier works and moving forward in time?

MoMA: As with each of our collection installations, we consider many different options before settling on an organisational structure. In that photography is perhaps the only modern medium where it is possible to tell its history exclusively with work by women, we were fairly certain we wanted to do that from the start. We did work on the galleries simultaneously, because what you do in one inevitably has an impact on what comes before and after.

MIL: The six galleries, and the relation between them, are curated very elegantly. The viewer is forced to travel through time in a way that feels organic. The viewing experience is naturally cumulative. Simply, is the point of the exhibition to show a historical trajectory?

MoMA: Thank you. We’re pleased you feel that way. One of our primary goals, as the title suggests, was to present a history of photography.

MIL: The majority of the show is portraiture. I doubt very much that if you attempted to curate an equivalent, all-male exhibition, there would be this much portraiture. This motif makes sense historically when women lived more domestic lives and their subjects were so limited, but I was (happily) surprised that the theme seemed to continue. Why do you think this is?

MoMA: There are many wonderful examples in the museum’s collection of, say, landscape or architectural photographs by women, and we certainly could have included more than we did. However, we were intrigued by how photographs OF women BY women suggested something simultaneously about the plasticity of photography and of female identity, and it’s for this reason that the selection tends to favour portraits, and more specifically, portraits of women.

MIL: When it comes to some of the more (in)famous artists in the show, how did you select the work? I’m thinking specifically of Diane Arbus and Sally Mann here. It was refreshing to see that neither was represented by their more controversial images, “freaks” in the case of Arbus and naked children in the case of Mann. Were you trying to avoid sensationalism?

MoMA: The process by which we made our selection of work by Diane Arbus and Sally Mann might be a good way to provide some insight into the curatorial process, although in neither instance were we trying to avoid sensationalism. For Mann, it’s quite simple: we only have one work by her in the museum’s collection, and we thought it worked well in this context. For Arbus, where our collection is much deeper, we considered many different selections, but decided that a group of her photographs of women allowed us to present the scope of her accomplishment through both well-known and lesser-known pictures.

MIL: There’s a nice balance between big-name talent and lesser known artists. It’s a bit flabbergasting though to walk through the exhibition and see work by Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Kiki Smith, Yoko Ono, Sally Mann, VALIE EXPORT, Cindy Sherman, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Kruger—and that’s just off the top of my head. It almost seems as though the most famous women artists are all photographers! What is it about the form that draws women and inspires such greatness?

MoMA: Since its invention, for a variety of reasons (from the absence of an established [male] academy to the Kodak Girl advertising campaigns), women have participated in and contributed to the development of photography as professionals and artists. Whether any of these reasons can sufficiently explain this phenomenon remains an open question.

MIL: Any favourites in the show? Anyone you wish you had included but couldn’t or didn’t?

MoMA: While it’s inevitable that we each have our favorites, and there are dozens —perhaps hundreds—of other photographs we would have liked to include, it’s probably best not to name names. We hope visitors will recognise some old favourites, and discover a few new ones along the way.

“Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” is on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art through March 2011

~ ALICE GREGORY

Picture Credit: Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) Untitled #92, 1981, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Fellows of Photography Fund
© 2010 Cindy Sherman