Peter Galassi | |
---|---|
Born | Washington, D.C. | April 18, 1955
Nationality | American |
Education | Phillips Exeter Academy B.A. – Harvard College Ph.D. – Columbia University |
Occupation | Curator |
Relatives | Barbara M. White (aunt) |
Peter Johnston Galassi (born April 18, 1951) is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. [1] [2] His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art. [3]
Galassi graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968. [4] Galassi holds a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College (1972) and a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University (1986). [5]
Galassi was Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1991 to 2011. He started his career at MoMA as a Curatorial Intern (1974–1975), Associate Curator (1981–1986), and Curator (1986–1991) working with photography curator John Szarkowski. [6] [7]
After first organizing a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit in 1987 as a photography curator at MoMA, he organized a larger Cartier-Bresson exhibit as chief curator of MoMA in 2010. [8] He was replaced as chief curator of photography at MoMA in December 2012 by Quentin Bajac, after retiring in 2011. [9]
He curated a large Barcelona exhibit of Gyula Halász in 2018, with the British Journal of Photography saying "exhibition could be considered to be Galassi’s biggest curatorial endeavour so far since he retired from MoMA." [10]
With "PROOF" in February 2020, he was guest curator on a collection of works from the collection of Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. [11] The exhibit was published in the book PROOF: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet from the Collection of Mark Schwartz + Bettina Katz in 2020, written by Galassi. [12]
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Frank Gohlke is an American landscape photographer. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".
Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer, who has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities that are usually hostile to outsiders.
Beaumont Newhall was an American curator, art historian, writer, photographer, and the second director of the George Eastman Museum. His book The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photographic history textbook. Newhall was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for his accomplishments in the study of photo history.
Mitchell Epstein is an American photographer. His books include Vietnam: A Book of Changes (1997); Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award; Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988 (2005); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); American Power (2009); Berlin (2011); New York Arbor (2013); Rocks and Clouds (2018); Sunshine Hotel (2019); In India (2021); and Property Rights (2021).
Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Louis Faurer was an American candid or street photographer. He was a quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition that his best-known contemporaries did; however, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).
Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world.
New Documents was an influential documentary photography exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. It presented photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis" and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize".
Robert Delpire was an art publisher, editor, curator, film producer and graphic designer who lived and worked in Paris. He predominantly concerned himself with documentary photography, influenced by his interest in anthropology.
Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a black and white photograph taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 1932. The photograph has been printed at variable dimensions; the print donated by Cartier-Bresson to the Museum of Modern Art is listed at 35.2 × 24.1 cm. It is one of his best known and more critically acclaimed photographs and became iconic of his style that attempted to capture the decisive moment in photography. The photograph was considered one of the 100 most influential pictures of all time by Time magazine.
Hyères, France is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1932. It is one of the photographs from the year when he started taking photography more professionally. He took then many pictures in France and in other countries, like Italy, Spain, Morocco and Mexico, with his portable Leica camera.
Rue Mouffetard, Paris, is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in a Paris street in 1954.
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux has overseen many exhibitions and books on photographers and photography.