Laurence Cornet : Malcolm Daniel, you have been appointed head of the photography department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. You started your career at the Metropolitan Museum with Maria Morris Hambourg, who is a Houston native – she grew up just a few blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts, where her father was a Trustee on the photography committee, and where her mother remains active. She had an enormous impact on you.
Malcolm Daniel: Yes, indeed. My contact with her began in 1987. I was a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just beginning my dissertation research. Maria was relatively new there as an associate curator in what was then the Department of Prints and Photographs. We shared a love of 19th-century photography. I went the next year to Paris to do my dissertation research and a position opened up as her assistant when I came back in 1989. She held it open for about 6 months so I could finish writing my dissertation before starting as a curatorial assistant.
LC : She is now stepping back in photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and everybody is delighted about that…
MD : She is a brilliant curator. She knows how to orchestrate an exhibition so that it’s edited down to a manageable amount, and she creates a rhythm and builds a sort of theater in an exhibition. She is also a poetic writer and wrote beautiful exhibition labels that were a model for me. I learned a tremendous amount about how to be a curator from Maria. I jokingly call my early years at the Met “post-graduate vocational training.” Maria has been a very generous mentor to me and was wonderful about giving real responsibility and credit to those who worked for her. In the end, she recommended to Philippe de Montebello, who was director at the time, that I succeed her as the department head when she began to step aside in the early 2000’s.
LC : The first major show you curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was in 1994, on the 19th-century French photographer of landscape and architecture, Edouard Baldus, who was the subject of your doctoral dissertation. During your nine-year leadership of the Department, the Metropolitan acquired some 20,000 photographs spanning the full history of the medium. How do you imagine to plan to develop the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston?
MD : Anne Wilkes Tucker has built an amazing collection here, primarily 20th-century work. She herself says that she didn’t feel she had the expertise to collect 19th-century photography in depth, but even there, she bought some beautiful photographs. And then in 2002 and 2004, the MFAH acquired the holdings of Amsterdam-based collector Manfred Heiting, an encyclopedic collection of approximately 4,000 images. There are superb works by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of paper photography, Robert Adamson, Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre. There are beautiful pictures by Baldus, which are dear to my heart of course, works by Roger Fenton, great photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. This is quite a wonderful foundation to build upon, and I am happy to say that there are also gaps that I will enjoy trying to fill!
LC : The collection and the exhibition history that earned the museum its reputation in terms of photography was really built by Anne Wilkes Tucker, whom you will be working with until her retirement in June 2015. When she came at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, 38 years ago, there were 141 photographs in the collection. There are now 30 000! What are the scope and strength of this collection for you?
MD : Anne has built a very strong collection of 20th-century photography — particularly after World War I, and up to the 1980’s, mainly classic black-and-white work, but wide ranging: the collection includes great American pictures, European modernism – we have an amazing collection of László Moholy-Nagy. She has heavily collected mid-century Czech photography. Japanese photography is also an area that Anne collected deeply—she wrote an important book on the subject—and that continues to be a an area of focus for us with the expertise and activity of our associate curator Yasufumi Nakamori. Anne also showed a broad interest in understanding and collecting photojournalism earlier and more seriously than almost any other museum. There are also great examples of early conceptual photography, for instance John Baldessari, who this museum was the first to buy, and Robert Cumming, and William Wegman.
LC : Some reproductions of the 19th century photographs that you have acquired since you got here are hanging on your book shelf: Timothy O’Sullivan’s “Inscription Rock, New Mexico” from 1873; Giorgio Sommer’s photograph of Pompeii, also from the 1870’s; Baldus at the Louvre in the 1850’s; Roger Fenton ; Charles Soulier, and a Charles Marville’s photograph in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. What will be your focus, in terms of acquisitions and exhibitions?
MD : In terms of acquisitions, I will probably focus on the two ends: filling in things in the 19th century, which would be natural, but also contemporary photography–really trying to strengthen our collection of contemporary photographers who intersect with the contemporary art world. In terms of what I am organizing, my first real initiative will be to bring out of the storeroom some of the great treasures that we have and to make sure that whenever visitors come to the museum, they will see some of these masterpieces. There will be a permanent gallery for photography that will rotate every four months and always feature photographs spanning the history of the medium from its invention to the present day. Whenever you are coming to the museum, I want you to be able to see how the medium developed, and the variety of things that were done. You will always be able to see a daguerreotype, 1850’s pictures from England, European modernism and photojournalism, FSA photographs, as well as contemporary work.
LC : In that sense the photography department serves the mission of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston to be an encyclopedic museum – a universal museum. You currently have on the walls an exhibition curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker that brings together some of the most iconic magazine photographs of the 20th century, and a smaller show titled “The Will of Architecture” that “explores the desires of artists to investigate the architectonics of space through photography”. The MFAH also supports external organizations like Project Row House, a non-profit established by African-American artists and community activists who organize groundbreaking social an art programs in a lower class neighborhood. Within the museum, your collection is also made available for teachers to use: they can come and teach their class here with the originals of amazing photographs…
MD : We build the collection in order to be able to show it, not to be able to put it in a storeroom! The Museum of Fine Arts is central to Houston’s reputation as a photography town. There is a contemporary art museum right across the street, though they are not a collecting institution; there are a few photography galleries and serious collectors, though not the number that you have in New York, San Francisco or Chicago. In some cities, there is a lot of photo activity because of gallery scene; here, it is because of Anne Tucker’s work at the museum and because of FotoFest, which is an independent organization that has been led by Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin for also 30-something years. Anne Tucker is on the board of FotoFest but they are independent from the museum. We have sometimes been able to build our own collection in some areas because of the FotoFest biennial, though. This year for instance gives us a chance to look at a wide range of Arab photographers and to see which ones seem most meaningful to us. The world has come to us, and in this case someone with great expertise in that area, Karin Adrian von Roques, has made a first selection and brought it to Houston, so we look!
LC : What other surprises do you reserve?
MD : I think as I put shows together they will have a different character than Anne’s shows because we are different people and have different interests. We will be showing in June the photographs of Charles Marville, which was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and is currently at the Metropolitan Musuem. The curator of the show is Sarah Kennel, associate curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., with whom I worked for a couple of years to bring the exhibition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the end, I left the Met before the show came! That was disappointing but the third venue for the show pulled out and we jumped at the chance to take it at MFAH. That will be great. I am excited to be able to present that. This is exactly the material that I am most passionate about.
Rendez-vous on June 15 for the opening, then!
http://www.mfah.org
http://2014biennial.fotofest.org
http://projectrowhouses.org
