“Framing the Field”: A Roundtable Conversation
Friday, January 19 at 9am PST • 12 Noon EST • 5pm BST
Event held via zoom • Registration Link
Photography Network membership is required to attend.
Image credits clockwise from top left: Vince Maggiora, Sandra Phillips at Work, 1994; Jim Huffman, Deborah Willis at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1991; Photographer Unknown, Anne Wilkes Tucker at her desk, c. 1976; David Del Gaizo, Maria Morris Hambourg Preparing for “The New Vision” Exhibition, c. 1989; Phil Charles, Sarah Greenough with Georgia O’Keeffe, 1983
Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions is an archival initiative focused on the institutional formation of the field of photography in the United States from the 1970s through 1990s.
Our long-form interviews examine the working lives of five women curators who ran, and in some cases founded, major photography departments in museums around the country: Sarah Greenough, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sandra Phillips, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and Deborah Willis. We analyze the interconnectivity of key structuring issues or frames–including class, gender, geography, institutional structures, race, and relationships–to reconsider how under-recognized factors have informed popular and scholarly understandings of photography today.
This roundtable conversation brings together authors contributing to a forthcoming special issue of History of Photography journal, which will feature excerpts from each of the interviews paired with critical responses that illuminate the range of approaches to interpreting this historical material. After providing a brief introduction to the project, we will discuss some of the ways that histories of photography can be reconceived in relation to intersections with archives, biography, and the mechanisms of art historical and historiographic writing. This conversation affords the authors the opportunity to engage in dialogue in real time with those they are thinking and publishing alongside.
Short Bios
Kate Palmer Albers is Associate Professor of Art History at Whittier College
Molly Kalkstein is Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Emilia Mickevicius is Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum
Anni Pullagura is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Yale Center for British Art, and Consulting Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Audrey Sands is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art
Delphine Sims is Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt are Co-Directors of Framing the Field