Founded by Alfred Barr and Beaumont Newhall in 1940, the Department of Photography at the MoMA was the first of its kind in an art museum. The department greatly influenced the entry of photography into other fine-art museums worldwide, and it also became a model for several institutions devoted to this medium, which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.
In 1991, at the age of 40, Peter Galassi was appointed director of this department. The position, one of the most prestigious in the field of photography, had previously been occupied by Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen, and John Szarkowski. After organizing more than 40 exhibitions and making vital acquisitions to MoMA’s photography collection, Galassi retired last year, leaving room for great speculation about his successor. In this exclusive interview with Sabrina Moura for La Lettre de la Photographie, Galassi shares his vision for photography, his current projects, and a selection of his favorite acquisitions for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
Sabrina Moura: In 1975, one year after you started to work at MoMA as a curatorial intern, you organized the show Picture Puzzles: Photographs by Robert Cumming, Clarence John Laughlin, Man Ray, and Frederick Sommer. Could you tell us about the experience of organizing an exhibition during this early stage of your career?
Peter Galassi: That’s a blast from the past—I was 23 when I joined the staff in the fall of 1974. MoMA was much smaller then, and the intern was one of five members of the Department of Photography (the others were chief curator, assistant curator, supervisor of the study center, and secretary.) When I went down to the galleries in the morning to dust the pictures and check things out in general, I always passed Picasso’s Guernica on my way to the photographs.
An expansion of the museum that opened in 1964 had given Photography its first permanent galleries for displaying works from the collection. The whole space was about 150 square meters, and John Szarkowski (who had succeeded Edward Steichen in 1962) had carved out a small gallery for temporary exhibitions. It can’t have been more than 30 or 40 square meters, maybe less, but the four or five shows that it accommodated every year were a vital part of the program.
Szarkowski was a great teacher. He really encouraged his interns, and just about all of us got a chance to organize a small exhibition—under his watchful eye, of course. (He loved to tell what Frank Lloyd Wright had answered when asked if he had really designed a particular detail in one of Louis Sullivan’s buildings: “Yes—seven times!”) In 1971, Anne Tucker organized Photographs of Women before going off to build a great program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1976, Maria Morris Hambourg organized Stephen Shore’s MoMA debut before heading to Paris to pursue her study of Atget.
With the inevitable naïve arrogance of youth, I was determined to make a show that would mark my independence from Szarkowski’s aesthetic (whose richness and depth, in fact, I had only barely begun to absorb). So the defining rubric of the show was straight photographs of set-ups or scenes that the artist had arranged. It arose in no small part from my attraction to Robert Cumming’s then very recent work. I didn’t really understand the pictures, but I sure did love them.
Sabrina Moura: In the beginning of the 1980s, you focused on photography’s relationship to traditional arts, particularly painting. At that time, you were not only working on your doctoral dissertation about Camille Corot’s Italian landscapes of the 1820s, but you also organized the show, Before Photography: Painting and The Invention of Photography, in which you argue the legitimacy of the medium in the Western pictorial tradition and situates its origins – “both technical and aesthetic – […] in the fifteenth century invention of linear perspective.” Three decades later, how do these early researches affect your understanding of photography?
Peter Galassi: Talk about the naïveté of youth! As I explained in the preface to Before Photography, it wasn’t my idea. It came from Heinrich Schwarz, one of the first classically trained art historians to become interested in photography. (His 1931 monograph on Hill and Adamson helped to inspire Beaumont Newhall.) Schwarz outlined the idea in a lecture, which John Szarkowski heard and admired. But Szarkowski was unable to pursue the idea before Schwarz died in 1974. Eventually the lecture was unearthed and published, but in 1980 when Szarkowski invited me to organize the show as a guest curator, all I had to go on was his recollection.
I was then working on my doctoral dissertation about Corot and early open-air painting, so I focused the exhibition on the material I knew best. In fact, the cultural environment at photography’s birth—including the scientific environment and its interactions with the culture at large—is a vastly richer subject. I think I was too young to do it justice, and now my main interests have to do with later periods, but I do hope that others will continue to explore that very fertile territory.
Sabrina Moura: In October, 1991 you were appointed as the successor of John Szarkowski on the direction of the Department of Photography at MoMA. What did this ‘transition’ represent to the department and to your career?
Peter Galassi: For me, it meant devoting myself to photography. While the search for Szarkowski’s successor was going on, I thought about what I might do if I didn’t get the job, and I wrote to my friend Charles Stuckey at the Art Institute of Chicago asking whether they might have room for a junior curator of 19th-century paintings. The MoMA job basically decided the rest of my career.
Szarkowski had been at MoMA for a long time, and he was a very forceful figure—in my opinion, still the best mind and pair of eyes of any photo curator we’ve had so far. Moreover, the world had changed—a lot. In the 1960s, a new tradition of photographic work had emerged within the mainstream art world, which essentially had nothing to do with existing photographic traditions. For Warhol and Rauschenberg, photography wasn’t so much a way of exploring the world as it was a treasure trove of existing images—and a tool for copying, combining, and manipulating them. By the 1980s, photography’s two worlds were not only very distinct from each other. There was a rather unpleasant mood of mutual suspicion, mutual ignorance, and mutual antipathy. I thought that the biggest challenge facing Photography at MoMA was to fully engage BOTH of those worlds. That was part of the point of the exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, which was on view in the fall of 1991 when I was appointed chief curator. And it was the central point of More Than One Photography in the spring of 1992, a collection exhibition that drew on photographic works in all six of the museum’s curatorial departments. (There are seven now, Media and Peformance Art is the addition.)
Two decades later, the barrier between those two worlds has very considerably eroded and I think the challenge is rather different: The mainstream art world now has no trouble accepting photography, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has learned how to look at a photograph.
Sabrina Moura: During your tenure at MoMA you curated not only a significant number of solo and group exhibitions, but also made vital acquisitions to the Museum’s photography collection, such as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series, and a selection of Lee Friedlander’s photographs. What do you consider to be your major contributions to the Museum?
Peter Galassi: Certainly the collection was a major focus. Steichen was fundamentally indifferent to the collection, and although Szarkowski made some great acquisitions, notably the massive Atget collection purchased from Berenice Abbott and Julien Levy in 1968, he put more energy into exhibitions and books. I was very conscious that I happened to be sitting in MoMA’s photography chair during photography’s golden age of collecting, the Getty’s Department of Photographs was founded in 1984, the Musée d’Orsay opened in 1987, the Gilman Paper Company and the Canadian Centre for Architecture were forming their great collections. And so on and so forth.
In 1991 and then again a decade or so later, my colleagues and I and the Trustee Committee on Photography conducted a thorough review of the strengths and weaknesses of the collection and established collecting priorities and strategies. That initiative greatly strengthened the area of high modernism between the wars—notably through the acquisition of the Thomas Walther Collection—and led to the active pursuit of in-depth collection of major postwar figures, beginning with Frank, Winogrand, Friedlander, Arbus, and Avedon, and on to Sherman, Michael Schmidt, Judith Joy Ross, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and a number of others.
But I would say that I am most proud of the fact that I didn’t just work on my own exhibitions and books, or for my own department. I always worked for the museum as a whole. I think that is a rising challenge for curators in a professional world where success is increasingly identified with individual achievements.
Sabrina Moura: In 2011, a number of exhibitions, forums and symposiums discussed the future of photography. The necessity of understanding the consequences of the digitalization of the medium, its new ways of being shared and distributed, seems to be an urgency to contemporary photographers, critics and curators. How do you see this need to anticipate the future of photography?
Peter Galassi: I didn’t see From Here On, but I wish I had. That’s a bunch of very alert and clever people, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed and learned from the show. But of course an exhibition can’t show the future. It can only display works that already exist, and museums deal with the past, even if it’s only last week. My conviction is that, if you want to influence the future of the arts, you need to be an artist.
As for digital technologies, it’s been obvious for some time that they’re transforming nearly every aspect of our lives, photography is the least of it. Ease and speed of transmission, changing mechanisms of distribution and sharing, no doubt all of that is very important. But it isn’t unique to photography.
I also think that we may still be at the beginning of that transformation, and I suspect that the only ones who will be truly wrong in their predictions are the ones who are certain that they’re right. Recently I got so tired of hearing how new technologies have destroyed photography’s grasp of reality that I put together a lecture about some of the many ways that, on the contrary, digital tools have improved and extended the medium’s ability to explore and engage the world, with examples of work by artists as diverse as Jeff Wall, Richard Benson, Andreas Gursky, Barry Frydlender, and Paul Graham.
For example, Graham has pointed out that digital cameras mean that the photographer no longer needs to spend money on film and so needn’t worry about taking too many shots. That gift, plus the process of reviewing his work on a computer screen, contributed to the marvelous body of work that he called a shimmer of possibility, in which an array of several (or more than several) pictures subtly introduces the experience of time, not too much, just a little stretch of it, in a way that no one had ever done before. Nothing photoshoppy about it.
Finally, let’s remember that photography was never the truth, no matter what some people wanted us to believe. Now some people want us to believe that digital technology has robbed photography of the truth that it never possessed.
Sabrina Moura: Last year, when you left MoMA, an announcement mentioned that you would devote your time to writing. What are your current projects?
Peter Galassi: The first big project that I want to do is about a sea change that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Stieglitz and his pals had tried to make photography art by withdrawing from the modern world, and the big sprawling mess of applied photography. The big discovery of the interwar modernists was that plain, banal photographic fact could be the raw material of a new art, and that the big, sprawling vernacular mess was not only full of tasty clues and provocations, it also contained fully formed artistic sensibilities. Atget is the prime example, but there were others as well: No one had ever heard of Timothy O’Sullivan until a copy of the Wheeler album fell into Ansel Adams’s hands and blew his mind. Across the board, from Moholy-Nagy and Brassaï and Man Ray, to Adams to Walker Evans, the period’s innovators embraced and collected and applauded the vernacular past and unfolding present. In doing so, they simultaneously initiated photography’s modernist traditions and projected that tradition backward, into the past. They invented the messy, hybrid beast that we now call the history of photography.
Sabrina Moura
