Russell Lord (born 1977) is an American writer and curator working in the field of photography and the history of art. He is currently the Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum. [1] He previously served as the Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Initiatives at the American Federation of Arts (2023-2024) and the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, a position he held from October 2011 to April 2023. [2]
Lord was born and raised in Massachusetts and Virginia. He received a B.A. in art history and French from James Madison University in 2000, and an M.Phil. in art history from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2009. His graduate work focused on 19th-century French and British photography and its relationship to printmaking. [3]
Prior to his graduate work, Lord worked at the Yale University Art Gallery in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs from 2000 to 2003. [4] During that time he coordinated the production of a major monograph on photographer Emmet Gowin’s aerial work, Changing the Earth. [3]
While enrolled as a graduate student, Lord was awarded a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship to continue research on his doctoral dissertation and participate in the activities of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photographs. [5] During the course of the two-year fellowship, he researched the Met's collection of early photography, and presented excerpts from two chapters of his dissertation. [5] Lord organized an exhibition for the Johnson Galleries at the Met and assisted Malcolm Daniel on the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. [6]
In 2011, Lord accepted the position of "Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings" at the New Orleans Museum of Art. [2] Since arriving at the museum, Lord has organized dozens of exhibitions on historic and contemporary photographs, prints, and drawings, working with artists such as Willie Birch, Edward Burtynsky, [7] Lee Friedlander, [8] Dawn DeDeaux, Vera Lutter, [9] and more. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Lord organized and participated in a variety of programs, including interviewing Pulitzer Prize winning writer Tony Kushner about his work on the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln. [10]
In 2013, Lord organized Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument, an exhibition about the process behind Gordon Parks’ first photographic essay for LIFE magazine. [11] The exhibition originated at NOMA then traveled to five other venues: The Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, [12] The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, [13] The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, [14] and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. [15]
During his time at NOMA, Lord has increased the museum's photography collection by over 30%, bringing the collection's total to around 12,000 works. [16] Along with museum Director Susan M. Taylor, Lord helped organize the creation and endowment in 2013 of the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Pailet Gallery, a gallery dedicated to photographic works on paper. [17] In 2018, the photography department was promised a donation of 1,300 photographs from the collection of Tina Freeman by artists such as Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, and Alfred Stieglitz. [18] This donation was hailed as the “largest and most significant single gift of photographs in the institution’s history.” [19]
In 2018, Lord published Looking Again: Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art in conjunction with Aperture and the New Orleans Museum of Art. [16] The book, a survey of the museum's photography collection, examines 131 photographic objects, many of which "actively embraced [photography's] curious connection to death and its unique capacity to simultaneously record reality and warp it." [20]
In 2019, Lord secured another major gift for the photography department, when Del and Ginger Hall established a fund to support the department's activities. [21] As Ginger Hall explained, “[Lord] nurtured a relationship that’s helped us grow and consider ways we might inspire others.” [21] Also that year, In 2019, Lord was a visiting instructor at the University of New Orleans, teaching a class on the history of photography and curatorial practice.
It was announced in February, 2021, that NOMA was bequeathed Dr. H. Russell Albright's important photography collection of over 350 works. Primarily masterworks by contemporary photographers such as Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the collection also includes some excellent examples of earlier twentieth-century photography by such artists as Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Man Ray, and many others. “Russell Albright’s eye was incredibly discerning, a trait that is visible across his collection, be it in his selection of a rich modernist print from the 1930s or a powerful contemporary photograph” said Lord. “Albright never shied away from adventurous or even controversial images, amassing a collection that is as critical as it is beautiful.” [22]
Lord serves on the advisory board of The Gordon Parks Foundation, and is an at-large board member of the New Orleans Photo Alliance. He lives in the Berkshires with his wife and two children.
In April 2023, Lord was appointed Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Initiatives at the American Federation of Arts. https://www.amfedarts.org/afa-staff/
In October 2024, Lord was appointed Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum [23] .
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator. He is considered among the most important figures in the history of photography.
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.
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).
Juergen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer. He was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography in 2003 and received the Special Presentation International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2018.
The term vernacular photography is used in several related senses. Each is in one way or another meant to contrast with received notions of fine-art photography. Vernacular photography is also distinct from both found photography and amateur photography. The term originated among academics and curators, but has moved into wider usage.
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".
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.
The New Orleans Museum of Art is the oldest fine arts museum in the city of New Orleans. It is situated within City Park, a short distance from the intersection of Carrollton Avenue and Esplanade Avenue, and near the terminus of the "Canal Street - City Park" streetcar line. It was established in 1911 as the Delgado Museum of Art.
Robert Polidori is a Canadian-American photographer known for his large-scale color images of architecture, urban environments and interiors. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles. His photographs are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Château de Versailles, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), as well as many private collections.
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.
Alice Boughton was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form.
Rosalind Fox Solomon is an American photographer based in New York City.
Mark Haworth-Booth is a British academic and historian of photography. He was a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from 1970 to 2004.
William (Kross) Greiner in New Orleans, Louisiana, is an American photographer and multi-media artist living in Santa Fe, NM.
Mona Kuhn is a German-Brazilian contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence. An underlying current in Kuhn's work is her reflection on our longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As a result, her approach is unusual in that she develops close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy. Kuhn's work shows the human body in its natural state while simultaneously re-interpreting the nude as a contemporary canon of art. Her work often references classical themes, has been exhibited internationally, and is held in several collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
John P. Jacob is an American curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela, graduated from the Collegiate School (1975) in New York City, and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic (1981) and an MA in art history from Indiana University (1994).
Peter Johnston Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.
Sophie Hackett is the curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
The Flatiron is a colored photograph made by Luxembourgish American photographer Edward Steichen. The photograph depicts the recently erected Flatiron Building in New York, taking inspiration from fellow photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, who had just photographed the building a year prior. The original negative was made in 1904 and spawned three platinum-gum exhibition prints in brown (1905), blue-green (1909), and yellow-green-black.