July 21, 2021
3:00 pm EST
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ykamP4OFSe6vOAOBjytXyg

Philip Gefter will make a case for Avedon as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, discussing his mentors, his influences, how he revolutionized fashion photography and, simultaneously, how he advanced the genre of portraiture in photography with work that becomes ever more enduring with time.

Philip Gefter is the author of two biographies: What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon (Harper) and Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (Liveright), which received the 2014 Marfield Prize for national arts writing; and a collection of essays, Photography After Frank (Aperture). He was the Page One Picture Editor at The New York Times and wrote regularly about photography for the paper. He was the photography critic for the Daily Beast in its early years and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker: Photobooth and Aperture, the quarterly of photography. He produced the award-winning documentary, Bill Cunningham New York. He resides in New York City.

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Sarah Kennel and Andrea Nelson will discuss some of the critical issues at stake in the organization of exhibitions focused exclusively on women photographers. Kennel’s Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection is currently on view at the High Museum of Art. The exhibition showcases more than one hundred photographs from the museum’s collection, many of them never before on view, and explores the contributions of women photographers to the medium. Nelson’s upcoming The New Woman Behind the Camera features more than 120 international photographers and explores the pathbreaking work made by women from around the world during the 1920s to the 1950s. The exhibition presents a geographically, culturally, and artistically diverse range of practitioners to advance new conversations about the history of modern photography and the continual struggle of women to gain creative agency and self-representation.

Sarah Kennel is the High Museum of Art’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography, where she is currently preparing an exhibition on the history of photography in the American South. Recent projects include exhibitions on Sally Mann, Olivia Parker and John Thomson. From 2015 to 2019, Kennel served as the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum. Kennel previously served for nine years as a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Andrea Nelson is associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She has organized several exhibitions on modern and contemporary photography and video art at the National Gallery where she also serves as cochair of the museum’s Time-based Media Art Working Group. Previous research and publications have focused on the history of the photobook.

Heloisa Espada and Sarah Meister will discuss the upcoming exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964, which explores the unforgettable creative achievements of São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), a group of amateur photographers whose ambitious and innovative works embodied the abundant originality of postwar Brazilian culture. Although their work was widely heralded by other artists, particularly in the 1950s, this is the first museum exhibition to present this fascinating moment in photography’s history to audiences outside of Brazil.

In May 2021 Sarah Meister will become the Executive Director of Aperture. She has been a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art since 2009, where most recently she organized Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures. Other recent publications and projects have considered the work of Gordon Parks (2020), Luigi Ghirri (2020), and Frances Benjamin Johnston (2019).

Heloisa Espada has been curator at Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil, since 2008, and concluded a PhD in Art History at University of Säo Paulo, in 2011. She works with Brazilian modern and contemporary art, especially with theier connections with photography. In 2016, she published the book Monumentalidade e sombra: o centro cívico de Brasília por Marcel Gautherot. Among the shows that she organized at IMS, we may quote Geraldo de Barros e a fotografía (2014), Conflitos: fotografía e violéncia política no Brasil, 1889-1954 (2016) and Arquivo Peter Scheier (2020).

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5245

Simon Baker will introduce the MEP's upcoming exhibition Moriyama - Tomatsu: Tokyo and discuss these leading figures of Japanese photography in a broader context, highlighting their relationship, their inspiration, and their influence. Conceived originally by Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu themselves, this collaborative exhibition remained unrealized during the lifetime of Tomatsu. Through a major overview of the works of both Moriyama and Tomatsu, the exhibition highlights a shared fascination with the Japanese capital that both artists spent decades exploring.