Curating photography

Interview with Peter GALASSI, Former Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA, New York

By Daniel Palmer – Published: 25/08/2016

"The biggest thing that happened, and what defined the biggest challenge of my twenty years as Chief Curator, was that photography’s indigenous traditions, photographic traditions, were joined by a new tradition of photography within the contemporary art world. It really began to take shape in the 1960s, and by the late 1970s was a real force to be contended with."
"The other big challenge was that we’re now towards the end of the golden age of collecting"
"Well I think of Steichen as an aberration in an otherwise normal history of a museum. You know Steichen was a great artist, he was a great artist at least twice over, but by the time he came to MoMA he was a person who always wanted to be at the centre of things. And his perception, beginning sometime in the 1930s, was that the centre of things was the magazine business – photography as mass communication. He set out to be a big player in that world and at MoMA that’s what he was, he was like Life magazine inside the walls of the museum. "
"I think Szarkowski is still, by a long shot, the best curator and historian photography has had, so far. But that doesn’t mean he was always right. He was unresponsive to a certain swath of activity, that’s for sure. Of course, curators have a responsibility that artists don’t have, nevertheless, you judge artists on their best work, not on their average work. So if you judge Szarkowski on his best work, no other curator’s done that well. And after all, now that the dust is settling on this, if you had to pick the three most important photographers, the three most important artists who made photographs in the 1960s – Winogrand, Friedlander, Arbus…"
I am so tired of hearing about how digital technology has destroyed photography’s connection to the real world, that I’m thinking about organizing a show about all the ways that digital technology has enhanced photographers’ abilities to be involved in the real world.
Interview conducted in October 2013  photocurating.net/peter-galassi/