An archival initiative to record untold histories of photography through the voices of curators who shaped the field.
About
Framing the Field is a collaboration between Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt that examines the history of photography and museums through the experience of five influential photography curators working in the United States from the 1970s through 1990s: Sarah Greenough, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sandra Phillips, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and Deborah Willis.
The Disscussion
In 2022, Pappas and Zelt sat down to interview each curator individually, in conversations that ranged from 8 to 18 hours. Each addressed key issues that impacted curators across 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 that together made the institutional field of photography as we know it. While Pappas and Zelt will conduct supplemental interviews with an expanded group of participants, ultimately they will co-author a book built from these women’s stories.
Archive
Ultimately, the transcripts of the interviews will be stewarded to a public archive. By making these conversations public, Framing the Field offers both essential documentation and an alternative framing of the expansive and intertwined cultural factors that have helped to define photography as it is often historicized today.
Support
Framing the Field is an independent research project hosted and fiscally sponsored by the Visual Studies Workshop. 501(c)(3) eligible donations can be made here, or by mailing a check to VSW with Framing the Field in the memo field.
Framing the Field is made possible through the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.
If you would like to talk to us about this history, or think we should interview someone in particular in the future, please reach out and let us know.