Susan Meiselas teaching elementary school student, South Bronx, New York, 1972. Photograph by Community Resources Institute. Courtesy Susan Meiselas Studio.

The 2024 WOPHA Congress, titled How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now, is a creative convening and exhibition series scheduled from October 23-26, 2024, across various locations in South Florida, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Organized by the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) in collaboration with PAMM, the event seeks to spotlight the significant contributions of women and non-binary photographers in contemporary art and innovate approaches to photography education. Through interactive experiences such as photo walks, portfolio reviews, exhibitions, workshops, and panel discussions, the Congress intends to redefine traditional photography education.

The theme How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now will delve into various topics, including collaboration in photography, Caribbean photography history, and current debates in the field. It aims not only to advance WOPHA’s global mission but also to highlight South Florida as an emerging center for contemporary photography, fueled by its vibrant cultural landscape and diverse population.

Among the scheduled events are masterclasses and panel discussions led by renowned art historians, educators, and photographers, alongside a city-wide program of exhibitions across South Florida. Virtual modules will also be available, enhancing accessibility to a global audience.

Key speakers include Latinx art historian and curator Aldeide Delgado, Founder and Director of WOPHA; Andrea Jösch Krotki, Director of the Art School at Universidad Diego Portales (Chile); Susan Meiselas, Documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation (USA); Muriel Hasbun, Artist and educator (El Salvador/USA); Rosell Meseguer (Spain), focusing on themes of memory and history; María Martínez Cañas (Cuba/USA), known for her experimental photography; José Antonio Navarrete (Venezuela/USA), specializing in Latin American art and photography; and Tatiana Flores (Venezuela/USA), whose research centers on Latin American and Caribbean art.

The four-day creative gathering, conceptualized by Aldeide Delgado, underscores the critical need for academic programs addressing the history of women in photography, despite the predominance of female students in the field globally. Delgado emphasizes the Congress’s role in initiating discussions on women, photography, and pedagogy as a foundational step toward establishing an educational hub dedicated to the study of photographic practices, criticism, and historiography.

This is why this year’s Congress marks the launch of the WOPHA Institute, a pioneering initiative that intends to challenge patriarchal norms and amplify the voices of women and non-binary photographers, while also responding to challenges in photography education, including declining enrollments and growing interest in alternative teaching methods, thereby advancing the field significantly.

The 2024 WOPHA Congress is set to be a pivotal event, fostering cultural partnerships and pushing the boundaries of photography education with a strong focus on inclusivity and innovation. To gain deeper insights into what’s ahead, we caught up with Aldeide Delgado, who shared her perspectives on the Congress’s mission, ambitious goals, key challenges, thematic focus, and the exciting new educational initiative launched by WOPHA.

In 2018, you co-founded the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) alongside your partner in life, visual artist Francisco Maso, who has served as its creative director since inception. Considering WOPHA as the foundation of this Congress, could you briefly discuss how the organization has evolved since its establishment and highlight some of its most significant achievements to date?

Reflecting on the past six years, the process has been intense. Our evolution has focused on ensuring long-term sustainability, growing our operational budget, securing local, state, and federal government grants, and solidifying private and foundation contributions.

Additionally, we have built a portfolio of high-quality, mission-driven annual programs, including conferences, workshops, exhibitions, artist residencies, and publications. All while fomenting a global network of women’s photography organizations.

These administrative elements, while seemingly secondary, have been crucial in achieving our vision: to be a permanent archive that preserves, documents, and promotes the work of women and non-binary photographers for generations to come.

Our most significant achievement to date has been organizing the world’s first WOPHA Congress (November 17–20, 2021). This event brought together 44 art historians, curators, and artists, along with 40 women photography collectives and organizations, and more than 100 women photographers from around the world. The Congress presented seminal and emerging research, addressing both national and international discussions regarding women and feminism in the history of photography.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in promoting and supporting women photographers, and how do you overcome them?

Building a new organization such as WOPHA has allowed me to problematize the Archive as a modern/colonial institution per se and question its systems of operation, categorization, and knowledge production. I have focused on critically thinking about the conceptual and geopolitical place of the organization, framed within border, feminist, decolonial, and archipelagic narratives while expanding its local, national, and international reach.

A significant challenge has been the experimentation that comes with rehearsing new models following a trial-and-error strategy. People working in traditional institutions often feel uncomfortable moving beyond established modes of thinking and working. However, gaining trust from key allies has been instrumental in our success.

There is also a lack of regionally diverse references and examples of other successful institutions that have excelled with a feminist methodology and governance. This gap has required us to build those references ourselves and develop our own methods while educating our team on what it means to work from a feminist perspective.

WOPHA functions as an organic entity with various individuals volunteering, collaborating, and supporting at different times.

Another major challenge we face is the vulnerability provoked by the lack of diverse sources of funding. The scarcity of resources leads to an overload of work for our team, who perform multiple tasks that would typically have independent positions in larger institutions. Overcoming these challenges has involved persistent effort and collaboration to create sustainable and impactful support, internally as an organization, but also for our community.

Why was this year’s Congress titled How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now, and what does this theme signify in the context of contemporary photography and artistic discourse?

The title of this year’s Congress, How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now, references visual artist and scholar Carmen Winant’s 2021 book, Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now. Winant’s work delves into how photographs can serve as more than just documentary evidence—they can act –and she demonstrates it through a curated selection of archival images– as guides, manuals, and educational tools. She coined the term “instructional photographs” to describe a kind of images, distinguished from traditional documentary photography, that actively teach us how to navigate life, how to see, or how to learn a new skill.

As I engaged with Winant’s book, I became increasingly interested in how pedagogies and curatorial practices can be integrated to foster more active audience participation in the conceptualization and experience of exhibitions. This is less about educational programming, and more about educational tools as art curating.

The notion of instruction is pivotal here—it’s a tool that can shift the audience from passive spectators to active participants without falling into the trap of didacticism or authoritarianism. I think this approach is particularly relevant for photography exhibitions and has been a topic of several discussions between visual artist and WOPHA Creative Director, Francisco Maso and myself. His own artwork in the past years has directly addressed the structure of manuals and instructions to radicalize the exhibition display and engage the audience meaningfully.

One of my primary goals for the 2024 WOPHA Congress as a photography-based, multi-modal, curatorial project was to expand the reach of the program beyond the traditional confines of the art museum and to impact a diverse range of audiences who interact with photography in their everyday lives. In the emerging art history of Miami, this is a significant act.

Additionally, this focus on teaching led me to reflect on the lack of scholarly studies focused on radical and experimental practices of photography education, especially in contrast to the growing body of research work on feminist curatorial and archival practices. While there has been significant theorization around these latter areas, teaching has not received the same level of scrutiny. This gap in the discourse became a central focus for this Congress, as we assume the incomplete task to reflect on women, photography, and pedagogies.

How did you select the featured speakers for this year’s Congress, and what criteria were essential in shaping the lineup? Can you highlight a few key themes or perspectives that each invited participant brings to the Congress?

I began the speakers’ selection for this year’s Congress with a clear starting point and set of critical questions: Even though 75% of photography students worldwide are women, there remains a glaring absence of academic programs specifically addressing the history of women in photography.

This led me to question the current state of photography education and the specific needs within this field. Who are the women who have played crucial roles as photography teachers, mentors, and educators? What have been their working conditions and contributions to the curriculum? What feminist pedagogies can be applied to the teaching of photography, and how do these impact the learning experience?

I sought out authors, scholars, and practitioners who have written, lectured, or published on these issues within culturally and geographically diverse contexts. However, I found very little information with a historiographical and critical approach to these topics. Faced with this challenge, I decided to shift my methodological approach.

Considering a history still waiting to be written, I proposed inviting those authors and educators who could contribute to shaping a new, decolonial and non-patriarchal photography curriculum, one that could eventually be part of the WOPHA Institute curriculum.

Given the breadth of this approach, I then decided to structure the Congress around specific modules such as “Visual Pedagogies,” “Radical Readings,” “Situated Knowledges” and “Archipelagic Networks” and invite professors, curators, and artists with a particular interest in photographic, pedagogical, and feminist practices.

For instance, one of the first confirmed speakers was Carmen Winant, who also recommended inviting Sofia Cordova. Both are artists who identify as photographers who do not take photographs, and they will engage with the concept of friendship as a generative force in creative and teaching practice.

Andrea Jösch will discuss a pedagogy of images that challenges the “universal” history, and formal laws taught in technical schools, aiming instead to address the invisible and unseen. Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and Laura Wexler will present their recent book Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, a pedagogical tool that reexamines photography narratives through the lens of collaboration.

Mariko Takeuchi, who received a Fulbright Grant for her research on photography education in the U.S., will offer a lecture on Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to the present, challenging the established canon of Japanese photography.

Another scholar, Emilie Boone, will highlight Haiti’s potential role in articulating the complexities of photography. Siobhan Angus will moderate a conversation with artists Rosell Meseguer, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Hiền Hoàng focused on materiality and the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction as a precondition of photography.

The WOPHA Congress brings together over 35 national and international artists, professors, and curators, fostering a dialogue that not only addresses gaps in schools’ curricula, but also imagines new possibilities for the future of photography education.

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the underrepresentation and undervaluation of women and non-binary photographers in the broader landscape of photography and contemporary art. Despite their significant contributions, particularly from Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx communities, their perspectives have often been marginalized. How does this Congress contribute to broadening this conversation, and what unique perspectives and narratives do these photographers bring to the forefront?

I am deeply passionate about this edition of the Congress, co-organized with Francisco Maso and Amanda Bradley, WOPHA Associate Curator of Programming. It centers on artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas, with a particular emphasis on South Florida, through panel conversations, exhibitions, and key institutional partnerships. This focus is central to WOPHA’s mission, as I see Miami as a border space—a political place—connecting the Americas.

The panel titled Caribbean Photography History explores the relevance of the Caribbean as a geographic region and as a theoretical framework for understanding the history of photography. This panel, featuring esteemed speakers such as José A. Navarrete, Emilie Boone, Roshini Kempadoo, and Tatiana Flores, delves into the Caribbean’s complex relationship with photography and the challenges involved in studying the medium’s history within this context.

Additionally, the Congress highlights other notable participants with deep roots in the region, such as Muriel Hasbun from El Salvador, now based in Washington D.C.; Keisha Scarville, who has Guyanese heritage; and Noelle Theard, born in El Paso to a Haitian father and French mother. Their work broadens the conversation around underrepresented voices in photography, particularly from an archipelagic perspective.

Amanda Bradley has also curated an exhibition titled In Between Sentiments at Miami International Airport, featuring emerging artists Nicole Combeau, born and raised to Colombian migrants in Miami, and Sue Montoya, born in Los Angeles and raised between Tegucigalpa and Miami. Through their work, these artists explore themes of identity, memory, place, and migration.

I believe the Congress leads by example. In a context where Latin American and Caribbean authors are often excluded from the history of photography, we are positioning their work at the center of the conversation through other partnerships with organizations such as Maison de la Photographie de Guyane-Amazonie and Foto Féminas.

In collaboration with the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) at Pérez Art Museum Miami, we are also proud to present the second edition of the CCI + WOPHA Fellowship. Our 2024 fellow, Claudia Claremi, will spend a month in residence at El Espacio 23 this September, developing her ongoing series La memoria de las frutas. This large-scale, research-based project delves into the sensory and emotional connections people have with fruits, illuminating on the larger impact of industrial agriculture in the Caribbean, the migratory pathways of both fruit and people, the diminishing presence of fruit trees in Caribbean communities, and the challenges these communities face in accessing once-plentiful fruit.

Adama Delphine Fawundu. Earth seed New York State, 2017. © Adama Delphine Fawundu. Courtesy of Adama Delphine Fawundu

We spoke to the founder of WOPHA about rediscovering forgotten female Cuban artists and photography’s many uses – including its ability to provoke change.

Contemporary And: What is WOPHA and why did you establish it?

Aldeide Delgado: WOPHA, Women Photographers International Archive, is a nonprofit organization founded to research, promote, support, and educate, in partnership with other international organizations, about the role of those who identify as women and non-binary in photography. It evolved following a five-year examination of the contributions of women to the history of Cuban photography from the nineteenth century to the present for the Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers (Catálogo de Fotógrafas Cubanas).

When I moved to Miami in 2016, I was already focused on expanding my scope of work and I thought it was important to adapt to this country and city in the context of my work as an art historian. I was surprised that in this global city, whereArt Basel Miami Beach has become a cornerstone and there are so many international initiatives and aspirations from the artistic community, there was nothing related to photography. My ambition was twofold: to establish a project with international scope while maintaining a strong focus on the academic component – there could be dialogue about the cultural appreciation for photography and research at university level.

C&: WOPHA has a strong focus on historical research, and the notion of erasure is an important leitmotif. What does your research involve?

AD: I am an art historian by practice and I have an abiding love for the past. When I began the process of establishing the archive I was confronted by the lack of material on Cuban women photographers working before 1959. Lacking actual photographs, I conducted interviews and combed through magazines and newspapers trying to find work that oftentimes was not saved by the families of even very notable artists, like Chea Quintana. This was shocking to me, and I was driven to create a space to preserve work that was underrecognized during these women’s lifetimes. It was particularly rewarding when my work led to the correct identification of work by Abigaíl García Fayat that had been donated to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and previously described as anonymous. I operate under the premise that you can’t speak about what is happening today without recognizing the work of our predecessors, and my mission is to make that information accessible and available online.

C&: Women, queers, and people of color have problematized the medium of photography. How do you deal with concepts like “woman,” “photography,” and “feminism,” which are constantly discussed and in motion?

AD: These changing concepts are one of the main reasons I created the WOPHA Congress – to initiate discussions with the preeminent women photographers, art historians, and curators of our time. When I started the catalogue project in 2013, the discussion was around women and we didn’t have this movement around feminism. Now we are seeing that the cultural focus has expanded to include non-binary, trans, and queer people, and we need to ask whether these organizing titles have become reductive. For me, the question is whether “women” is still a useful category or whether we should speak about everything else. What are the works teaching us? Who is behind the camera ideologically, irrespective of gender, sex, skin color, sexual orientation, or how they identify?

With regards to feminism, we know the work is not done. There are even difficulties with the word feminism, which is why we employ it in plural form in the title of the inaugural Congress: “Women, Photography, and Feminisms.” We also need to acknowledge that there is a long tradition of feminists in this country, who have not recognized the experience of marginalized women in other countries. So we need to speak about feminists, but we also need to speak about the fights of women everywhere to get more recognition and representation. I ascribe to the premises of bell hooks as well as to Paul B. Preciado, who posits that the subject of feminism doesn’t need to be women, but rather the transformation of all society.

This is why I’ve always been very clear that with WOPHA everyone is welcome. We are doing work with women, but this conversation cannot happen if men are not part of it too.

C&: In an interview, you quoted the art critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau: “The history of photography is not the history of remarkable men, much less a succession of remarkable pictures, but the history of photographic uses.” What photographic uses do you find within the photographers participating in WOPHA?

AD: As a researcher with an empty canvas trying to decide where to begin, my approach was to examine how photography was consumed during specific periods. For instance, in the nineteenth-century studio photography was about how the public interacted with the photography world, then postcards became prevalent, then in the early twentieth century perceptions of photography among the masses completely changed through documentary photography and journalism. It is through the examination of these uses that you can find women photographers who have been forgotten and erased.

Another aspect to usage that warrants examination is how photography has the ability to provoke change by illustrating conflict. Take for example the work of Maria Kapajeva, who will speak at the Congress. Her series depicting the peripheral histories of mill workers in her hometown was used in the Estonian Parliament to illustrate the plight of workers denied sick leave.

C&: I’m fascinated by the current online abundance of selfies, of portraits. Especially for marginalized people, it seems to be the most accessible way to inscribe oneself in the world’s largest (alternative) image archive – until one can no longer be erased. And yet platforms like Instagram intervene, and the censorship of bodies read as female is inescapable. But there are also many attempts to subvert these restrictions photographically. Is photography today more an act than document of a single observation?

AD: Photography has never been about the object. The theorization that will occur at the Congress when we speak about photography as a collaborative practice will endeavor to highlight the social interactions that happen behind the photographic art. We need to shift the focus of attention to the process and the interaction between the subject, the person documenting the image, and the observer.

One of the works that is important to me for this reason is El Picnic by Nereida García Ferraz in collaboration with Laura González Flores and Eugenia Vargas Pereira. It is a project about photography, but it speaks about its relational component and the interactions that occur therein.

Enveloped by the morning sun and with a strong, black coffee in hand, I began the day prepping for my conversation with Aldeide Delgado. She is a Cuban-born, Miami-based historian and curator who in 2018 founded the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), a nonprofit organization. She has made an impact recognizing women photographers and their work, especially those from the Caribbean. WOPHA has collaborated with many organizations and platforms including 1854 Media, publishers of the British Journal of Photography. And WOPHA’s book, Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collectives & Organizations, co-edited by herself and Ana Clara Silva, was recently published in tandem with the launch of their first congress. What she has been able to achieve within her time working in the professional field to date is nothing short of impressive, where her work can be felt pulsing beyond the veins of this city.

After recently attending WOPHA’s first 2-day congress held this November, “Women, Photography, and Feminisms” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) – a milestone she and her team had accomplished – we met up through zoom to look back on the congress and learn more about WOPHA and her work.

CYJO: Can you talk about WOPHA and how it started?

Aldeide Delgado: I founded WOPHA five years after working on a Catalogue of Cuban Women Photographers, the first survey of Cuban photography history highlighting women’s contributions from the nineteenth century to the present. It’s the first comprehensive approach to Cuban photographic history from a feminist perspective. When this project began in 2013, I was studying art history at the University of Havana and found some major problems. First, the publications that covered Cuban photography were very outdated. Photography wasn’t included in the curriculum of art history. And considering how important photography was in the development and promotion of propagandistic ideas, especially in the 60s and 70s, it was crucial to create a project that reframed that discourse from the perspective of women. I saw this catalog, which centered on the unprecedented discussion of feminism, as a radical act in the Cuban context.

CYJO: I can imagine the challenges you may have had creating this catalog.

AD: Most of the research was done by going through the archive, and trying to find out how photography circulated in specific moments. Looking through the newspapers and magazines, trying to find information on women photographers was not easy because it was unknown. In the beginning, people told me “Why are you doing a catalog on Cuban women photographers? There aren’t any. And if there are, they’re no good.” From that perspective, my work became a quiet, activist practice that challenged this notion. I decided to create this research from the 19th century, specifically from 1853 where the first woman photographer in Cuba was publicly recognized, Encarnación Iróstegui.

The plan originally was to create a physical book, but in the process of my research, which included studio visits and meeting artists who were not exhibiting their work, I noticed the lack of opportunities that women photographers have. So, I created an online platform for the catalog that could serve as a place of reference for other artists, historians, and curators to find information about women in photography. And this could be revised when needed.

WOPHA emerged after moving to Miami in 2016. I started to adapt to a new society and context in a moment where you don’t feel 100 percent Cuban but you are not 100 percent American either, even though you have your documentation and passport. From these personal experiences, it made sense to widen the platform to cover artists from the Caribbean, Latin America, and South Florida, but from the history of photography, and from the perspective that considers decolonization, feminism, and this idea of being in a border space.

CYJO: In some circles, “feminism” can feel stigmatized or misunderstood. Can you tell us what it means to you?

AD: When the WOPHA Congress used the word “feminism,” it was in plural, not singular in order to recognize the struggles that women have across different contexts. For example, when we think of the suffragist movement, we think of mostly white, middle-class women. And not in all cases were they considering the experiences of racialized women. When I embrace this notion of feminism, I’m doing it from the perspective of many great women like Gloria Anzaldúa. She was a Chicana feminist author who viewed her feminist practice assuming the border (she referred to the border between Mexico and the United States) as a political place in which people from different ethnicities and cultures interact, live together, cross pollinate, and a new consciousness emerges. My understanding of feminisms is also inspired by bell hooks. She’s an African American scholar which includes both women and men as part of the conversation. It’s about transforming the binary structures that constitute the way in which we approach or understand the world. In the way that we’ve been taught, there has been a lack of representation for some individuals whose practices have been removed from History. For me, feminism is about bringing all these other stories to life.

But it’s not exclusive to women. One of the conversations in the congress was titled “Can men create feminist photography?” Because for me, women can follow the work that we may identify with a male gaze and vice versa. We are not monolithic. It’s not about who is behind the camera in the sense of gender or color. It’s more about the ideology the person is projecting to the world. For me, this is interesting, I want to problematize that. I stay away from essentialism.

CYJO: What were the highlights from the Congress?

AD: The congress was a dream come true, and there were so many highlights. The panel which covered a major book presentation – A World History of Women Photographers published by Editions Textuel (2020) was one of them. It is in French, but there are plans to translate it into English in the future. The panel included Marie Robert (Head Curator of Photography at the Musée d’Orsay), Luce Lebart (photography historian and curator for the Archive of Modern Conflict collection), and Maria Kapajeva (visual artist), moderated by Ileana Selejan (research fellow at the University of Arts London). In this book, 300 women photographers are recognized, and 160 women authors from around the world contributed, including myself. There was a decentralization to the process of creating this book as many books are given to one author’s perspective and research. I wanted to highlight how to create a universe that has this notion of collectivity and collaboration as the protagonists. This was important.

CYJO: Where do you see WOPHA in the future?

AD: I’m planning to schedule the next congress for 2024 when we can present topics as they continue to develop. The workshops, residencies, exhibitions, and collaborations we hold throughout the forthcoming years will help us determine the exact content. The next congress will be a way of taking the temperature on how the field of women in photography is evolving and expanding the vital discourse surrounding the work of women artists.

This interview was originally published at The Eye of Photography by CYJO.

About
CYJO is a Korean American artist based in Miami who works mainly with photography. Since 2004, she has been exploring the evolution of identity, questioning notions of categorization, and further examining our human constructs within her work. CYJO’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues which include The National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution), Asia Society Texas Center, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. Her last solo exhibition was at NYU’s Kimmel Windows | Art in Public Places (2019-2020). She is the co-founder of the Creative Destruction, a contemporary art collaborative founded with Timothy Archambault in 2016.

The Eye of Photography is the ultimate digital magazine where everything about photography is published daily, highlighted, discussed, and archived for all professionals and amateurs to see… for free. Whether you are working in this industry as a buyer or a collector, in a festival or a gallery, as a professional, or simply an amateur enthusiast of photography, The Eye was made for you. The Eye informs you of the latest trends, record breaking auctions, breaking news, reveals a long-awaited book publication, shares the discovery of up and coming stars, allows you to read in-depth interviews, and offers all you need to know about the next must see exhibition whether you live in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo or Shanghai.

Newsha Tavakolian. Portrait de Negin à Téhéran, 2010. © Newsha Tavakolian / Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Editions Textuel.

Luce Lebart is a historian of photography, curator, and French correspondent for the Archive of Modern Conflict collection. She directed the Canadian Institute of Photography from 2016 to 2018 and the collections of the Société Française de Photographie from 2011 to 2016. Her research focuses on archival photography, the history of techniques, scientific and documentary practices relative to image. She was the curator of (among others): Souvenirs du sphinx and Lady Liberty at the Rencontres d’Arles; Illuminations (Foto/Industria, Bologna); Frontera (National Gallery of Canada) and Gold and Silver (MBAC and FOAM Amsterdam, 2018). She has published several books, including Les Grands Photographes du XXe siècle (Larousse, 2017).

Rafael Soldi (RS): Hi Luce, nice to be chatting with you, from opposite sides of the world. So, tell me about your path to where you are today with photography and as a curator. How did you get here?

Luce Lebart (LL): My love for photography started when I was a child. I immigrated with my family from North Africa, and we had a suitcase filled with photos. During the holidays I used to spend lots of time going through these photos and trying to better understand the past. I studied at the National School of Photography in Arles, and I started working in museums, libraries, and collections because I was very attracted to archives, much like the one in our suitcase growing up. I developed a research practice but came late to curating; I was invited to curate an exhibition in Arles about10 years ago and I really enjoyed it. And since then I’ve curated many shows around the world. My main subject is really photographs that have been produced without an artistic intention, but photographs that still have a huge aesthetic potential.

RS: And what can we expect from your upcoming presentation at the WOPHA Congress: Women, Photography, and Feminisms?

LL: At WOPHA I will present the book that we’ve made, Une Histoire Mandible des Femmes Photographes. It’s a worldwide history of women photographers, which has been published in French but is now going to be published in English. I’m going to tell the story behind the book, how we made it, because it’s a huge adventure! It includes 300 photographers from the 19th century to now and features 160 women authors. And the idea was to give voice to women authors and photographers who have been overlooked throughout the history of photography. Another goal for us was to decenter the narrative by highlighting authors and photographers from all over the world—most of the books that are easily accessible center the narrative on American and European artists. So we really wanted to find an example of practices in places like Haiti, New Zealand, Africa. At first, we followed our intuition; for example, we recently realized that here in Europe there were women photographers in the 19th century. So we have this hypothesis that there were likely women photographers in the 19th century in other parts of the world as well, like in Panama. We collaborated with many researchers around the world, and the more we researched the more incredible women we found around the world. For example, in Panama, we were worried we may not find any women and in the end, we found more than fifty! Because we ended up connecting with so many passionate and excited people who were committed to bringing forth diverse narratives and rescuing forgotten histories. And then it was terrible because we had too many! So I’m hoping to expand on this whole process at the WOPHA presentation.

RS: So it sounds like that research process must have been so rewarding and so exciting.

LL: Yes. Well, it was also very challenging because to do such a work at this scale we really needed funding. We’re fortunate to have found in our publisher a very committed woman. She never stopped believing and asking for funding to bring this project to life. We also did the book in one year, which was very intense. We had already done a lot of work to build the network but once the funding came through, the clock started and we only had one year to pull off this big project that had so many contributors and moving parts! But as soon as we got the ball rolling, all our contributors hit the ground and things moved very quickly. I think it’s a moment in history where many people are realizing that women have been overlooked, not only in the history of photography but in all the fields of knowledge, science, politics. So people were very excited and it grew very organically.

RS: I can imagine! And along the way, I’m sure there were a lot of surprises and wonderful discoveries. Are there any memorable experiences or discoveries that stayed with you?

LL: I couldn’t say anyone photographer but one thing that was memorable about the process was that because our contributors were all over the world, the process also mirrored what was happening in those places. For example, our correspondent in Beirut, Lebanon, was affected by the protests, and her institution was closed. With others, we were dealing with opposite time zones. But one experience I do remember was toward the end of the process, we were trying to connect with an important photographer whom we felt needed to be part of the book. She was unable to participate in the end but pointed us to another artist who wasn’t on our radar. So I reached out to this new contact, but she asked if we had included Donna Ferrato in the book. So I said, oh, no, no, no, but it’s finished, we already have 300 women, we can’t add anyone else. So she said well, it’s too bad, but let me tell you a bit about her. And I loved hearing her voice on the phone telling me about this artist I didn’t know. Ferrato had been on an assignment for Japanese Playboy where she witnessed and photographed an altercation that led her to a long-term project documenting domestic violence that helped change the law in the United States. So she was part of this amazing change, and I told my colleagues, we cannot stop at 300, we have to add her. And we already had too many American photographers but we just felt this work was too important. And I love how this happened because it is what happens when you have these encounters and conversations—to me I was just so enthralled by her voice sharing this story over the phone. One woman making a case for another woman. It was so special.

RS: So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your love of vernacular photography. You’ve worked a lot with archives in many different ways, including a personal project of yours and some work with The Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC). I saw Collected Shadows back in 2013 in Vancouver at The Polygon Gallery, when it was still called Presentation House. I was blown away by this show and the archive, can you talk more about your involvement with the collection?

LL: When Timothy Prus curated the show you saw in Vancouver I wasn’t working with them yet, but I got to see the show at Paris Photo, because this show has traveled a lot. When I saw the show I was in shock because it felt very different and new to me. There were very well-known photographs by people like Daguerre exhibited alongside vernacular images, scientific images, et cetera. This is not an entirely new idea in America, where Julian Levy was exhibiting Duchamp alongside Atget in the 1930s. But regarding the way we exhibit heritage photography here in Europe, the Archive of Modern Conflict really shook things up.

Also here in France, in particular, the discourse around photography was increasingly academic and at some point, it’s almost as if writing was more important than seeing and sharing images. And I feel the Archive really reversed this and I found it very exciting. So now I collaborate with the collection and we’re preparing a new show that will open in Vancouver at The Polygon in 2022. It’ll be about clouds and vernacular photography.

RS: And the new space at The Polygon is so different from the last one. It’s more airy and open to the sky. The other space was more cavernous.

LL: Yes it is! And you know, even though I’m a historian of photography, it’s very important for me to keep a creative approach to the history of photography.

RS: How many items are in the AMC?

LL: Over 4 million!

RSi: Now tell me a little bit about your book, Mold is Beautiful, which has an archival context.

LL: Before being a curator of exhibitions I worked as a curator in institutional collections. I also directed the collection at the French Society of Photography, which is the first association of photography created in 1851 and is a very prestigious institution. While I was there we were doing inventory once and I discovered a wooden box under a shelf and inside there were autochromes and gelatin silver prints with traces of a past flood. Honestly, the box was being used to balance out the shelf! When I looked at them, I saw that some of them were totally amazing. I decided to do a book to give them new life, and you know, when you work in an archive mold is your enemy. I wanted to show the aesthetic power of this microorganism, the aesthetic power of an image that is created without an artistic goal, but that is so beautiful and abstracted.

What Was very interesting was that often the damage would meet the content of the image. For example, in some glass plates, there’s a sort of Milky Way formed from the gelatin that has detached from the plate and it worked beautifully in context. I worked with a publisher who I had worked with before and we decided to make a book rather quickly. It was a kind of manifesto as someone who was in charge of a collection that should not have moldy photos in it!

RS: Do you see these as artworks of your own or do you see them simply as beautiful objects that you wanted the world to see?

LL: It’s a complicated question but I love this question. I’ve learned with photography not to be so sure about the borders between art and the document or an archive, and this is what I love in photography. The way these lines are blurred and this ever-changing status is such a characteristic of the photographic medium, this questioning of what is art.

RS: Are the images in the book as you found them, or did you intervene further beyond documenting them?

LL: I didn’t intervene so much, maybe some color correction or basic adjustments but they’re pretty much as they appear in the book. But for me, that’s not a criteria for what makes something art or not. For example, Sherrie Levine made exact copies of existing work by other artists.

RS: That’s true. I was asking that primarily because the colors are so beautiful and I didn’t know if they were added or the objects looked that way.

LL: The colors were already there. And you know, when I found them I showed them to our preservation specialist and he said he had never seen some of these microorganisms. The way they bubbled and the color was very unique. What was very important was the work of editing. What was very important was the work of editing, choosing the right works that would work in the book format. And I’m working on a new follow-up book about an archive that I collected for years. I’m very happy about that.

RS: This is a perfect segway to my last question. I just wanted to know what you were working on and if there was anything else you wanted to share with us before we, we wrap this up.

LL: The most exciting project right now is this follow-up to Mold is Beautiful.” I’m also working on a book of interviews with artists working with plants, photosynthesis, and photography. I’m also researching and writing about photography, cooking, and chemistry. I’m connecting contemporary artists with the imaginary of the beginnings of photography, the archeology of photography, the imaginary of technique. And I’m also working on a project about the history of the darkroom.

RS: All of those projects sound wonderful and incredibly diverse. I feel like you have a very diverse practice.

LL: Yes, but there is a link between it all. I’m often very interested in things that have been overlooked. Whether it’s moldy photos, or documentary practices, or women photographers, I’m always searching for topics that are unexplored. That’s the thread.

RS: That must make your work very rewarding, you’re part-curator part-investigator!

LL: Yeah, exactly!

RS: Thank you so much for your time, Luce. I really appreciate it.

LL: Thank you, it was really nice talking with you.

Christina Fernandez. Maria's Great Exhibition, 1995 - 1996. © Christina Fernandez.

Elizabeth Ferrer is a curator and writer specializing in Latino and Mexican art and photography. She is also the chief curator of contemporary art at BRIC. Ferrer has curated major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art for numerous venues in the United States and Mexico, and has written and lectured extensively on topics related to her fields of interest. Exhibitions she has curated have appeared at such venues as BRIC House, the Americas Society, the UBS Art Gallery, and the Aperture Foundation Gallery, all in New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; the Snite Museum, Notre Dame University; and MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico. Other major exhibition projects include traveling retrospectives of such historic Mexican figures as Mariana Yampolsky, Lola Alvarez Bravo, and María Izquierdo, and the establishment of the BRIC Biennial in 2014. Ferrer recently authored Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History and her monographic work Lola Alvarez Bravo was a New York Times 2006 Notable Book of the Year.

Rafael Soldi: Hi Elizabeth, thank you for chatting with me today. Can you begin with some background on how you came to where you are today? When did your love for photography and Latinx photography in particular begin?

Elizabeth Ferrer: I was born and raised in East Los Angeles and came east for college and graduate school. After graduating, when I arrived in New York in the mid-1980s, I became more curious about my cultural heritage. This was at a time when Latin American or Latinx art was being little-taught, so I decided I’d simply start traveling to Mexico and go through a process of self-education. In Mexico City, I discovered a truly dynamic art scene that was such a fresh alternative to New York. I met many members of a generation of rising artists that were making truly compelling work. I decided to direct my efforts as a young curator to bringing Mexican art and artists to the United States. I was fortunate to be able to curate some big traveling exhibitions for the American Federation of Arts and Independent Curators International as well as for galleries in New York. I also became increasingly involved with Mexico’s photo community, and was also writing about Mexican photography, both historic and contemporary. Eventually, I wanted to work closer to home and with Latinx photographers in New York—this has also been an overlooked area in the visual arts, even among the Latinx art community. Several years ago I started the research for my book, Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History. This book, published earlier this year, represents the culmination of many years of working to provide platforms and exposure for artists outside the mainstream.

RS: After so many years championing Latinx photographers, what makes this the right time to publish your book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History ?

EF: The right time was probably many years ago since this has been such an under-studied area. Before my book was published, no such publication existed. In fact, photography by Latinx people is generally not taught at the college level, not collected by museums, and is little known by the critics and curators who create the photographic canon. I spent about seven years researching, writing, and then going through the editing process with the University of Washington Press. I believe that the book acts as a corrective; my aim is that these photographers do become seen as integral to the history of American photography. But at the same time, the book is a start. There is so much research to be done, and rising photographers in our community that deserve greater attention.

RS: The research you embarked on for this book is massive, I’m curious how you approached organizing the structure of the book. Were you surprised by where you ended vs how you envisioned it when the project began?

EF: This took a long time for me to think through. I wanted to write about a broad scope of photographers from the beginning of the history of photography, and from many parts of the United States, including Puerto Rico. One approach might have been to structure the book by ethnicity, looking at Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American photographers independently. But where would that leave Dominican photographers, or those from other Latin American countries who have long been based in the US? Ultimately, the book is arranged thematically, with an introductory chapter, and then separate chapters devoted to such themes as the rise of a Latinx consciousness in the US in the civil rights era, the 1960s; documentary photography; identity-based work, focusing on staged and constructed photography; family; geography; and conceptual approaches. I also include a separate chapter on Puerto Rico because in many ways it has its own independent history of photography, and photographers there have their own challenges and issues that they address in their work.

RS: There is already plenty of discussions out there about the term “Latinx,” I discussed it at length with Aldeide Delgado in a recent interview on Strange Fire. Like any label, it is imperfect and evolving but has value. To my knowledge, your book and Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics are the first major academic publications that not only embrace the term but use it as part of its title. What does it mean to you personally, and why was it important to use it in this context?

EF: I also spent a lot of time considering the term Latinx. In fact, in the earliest drafts of the book, I refer to “Latinos,” since Latinx had not come into wide usage at that point. I embrace the term for a couple of reasons. First, it’s forward looking. It is a term that came from our own community (unlike say, “Hispanic,” which became as a census designation) and it is a term that connotes self-affirmation and cultural autonomy. For me, the “x” is also powerful because while the original purpose of the “x” was to reject gender binaries, it also promotes intersectionality. We are all the sum of many parts, and I think the “x” in Latinx reminds us of this fact.

RS: In your role as Chief Curator at BRIC, what are some recent programs and exhibitions you are proud of, and what’s on the horizon that you’re excited about?

EF: The contemporary art program at BRIC has a strong goal of supporting marginalized and under-recognized artists, who we support in residencies, exhibitions, and other programs. I’m particularly proud at some of the exhibitions I’ve curated dedicated to Latinx artists, such as Juan Sanchez and Miguel Luciano. At the moment, we are showing a 55-foot long painting by Athena LaTocha, an indigenous artist whose monumentally scaled works on paper focus on the relationship of natural and man-made landscapes. The exhibition acts as an incredible, immersive experience for our audience. Time seems to slow down, as you gaze at all these abstract references that range from the glacial to the contemporary era. And finally, we’ve just begun to work on the next edition of the BRIC Triennial (formerly a Biennial), to be dedicated to disabled artists. This will be a BRIC-wide effort with curatorial contributions from the performing arts and media departments, as well as from the contemporary art team.

RS: Thank you Elizabeth, we look forward to your WOPHA presentation!

EF: Thank you so much Rafael, and I look forward to joining the conference next week!

Roxana Marcoci presenting Zofia Kukic’s work in the exhibition “Transfigurations”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fall 2019

Rafael Soldi: Hi Roxana, thank you for taking the time to chat with us.
Roxana Marcoci: It’s a pleasure, thank you for the invitation.

RS: The world has experienced extraordinary circumstances in the last two years—how have these experiences influenced your curatorial approach for the years to come?

RM: I have long been aware of the need for museums and universities to reassess the monolithic narratives of Western art history, which have fueled the colonialist imagination. To reassess the ways we research, write, teach, collect, and exhibit. The last couple of years have only reinforced the urgency for inclusive curatorship and pedagogy, for promoting a sense of equity in the ways we define the ethics of attention. It’s critical for museums to foster a more diverse and inclusive community, to invite people in, center them, care for previously obscured histories, and reposition modernist art from our positions in the present.

I am not sure if you are familiar with MoMA’s C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives)—a pan-institutional research program founded in 2009. The initiative promotes the multiyear study of art histories outside North America and Western Europe and is currently organized into four research groups that respectively focus on modern and contemporary art produced in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. C-MAP has produced a Primary Documents Publication Series, books which contain meticulously edited translations of source materials relating to the visual arts of specific countries, historical contexts, disciplines, and ideas, together with newly commissioned essays and other archival materials. In tandem with these anthologies, C-MAP’s monthly seminars concentrate on transnational histories and nonaligned networks, multiple modernities, and involve international dialogues with a variety of cultural workers. A website, post, makes C-MAP’s research available to a broader public. For me the most prescient question is how can we respond to the call to decolonize art history? It’s a question related to how we can decenter an academic, and respectively museological, discipline grounded in racialized concepts. How do we create epistemic communities grounded in equitable partnership, forms of reparation, and other legacies—postcolonial, intersectional feminism, queer, indigenous?

RS: You’re due to present at the upcoming WOPHA Congress: Women, Photography, and Feminisms this November. From Louise Lawler, to Carrie Mae Weems, Zoe Leonard, Taryn Simon, and Sanja Iveković, you’ve worked with many profoundly impactful women throughout your career. Can you speak to the work you’re doing to highlight women and feminist perspectives within an institution that is historically male-leaning in terms of its holdings and exhibition history?

RM: I have and will continue to foreground the work of women artists in all aspects of exhibition-making, collection, seminars, and publications. Right now, I am working on an exhibition titled Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists, which will open at MoMA in April 2022. It is accompanied by a book that covers 100 years of photography, part of a transformative gift to MoMA of works by women artists from psychotherapist and women activist Helen Kornblum. The project will bring forward a diversity of practices—including portraiture, photojournalism, social documentary, advertising, avant-garde experimentation, conceptual photography, and performative actions. The exhibition’s premise is that the histories of feminism and photography have been entwined. African-diasporic, queer, and postcolonial/Indigenous artists have brought a change of perspective to the specifics of gender politics. The book includes a critical essay that I wrote addressing the question: “What is a Feminist Picture?”; and a series of shorter thematic essays by emerging scholars Dana Ostrander, Caitlin Ryan, and Phil Taylor that explore themes such as identity and gender, the relationship between educational systems and power, and the ways in which women artists have reframed our received ideas about womanhood. Rather than presenting a chronological history of women photographers or a linear account of feminist photography, the project forges compelling dialogues among the works to activate new readings from the angle of a contemporary, intersectional feminist perspective. I like this approach because it offers both historical context and critical interpretation of the myriad ways diverse photographic practices might be construed through a feminist prism. By looking at the intersections of photography with feminism, civil rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and queer liberation, Our Selves will contribute vital insights into figures too often excluded from our current cultural narratives.

At the same time, I also work with male artists who embrace a feminist outlook. This is the case with the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, which is scheduled to open at MoMA in September 2022. An incisive observer and a creator of dazzling pictures, Tillmans has experimented for over three decades with what it means to engage the world through photography. He considers the role of the artist to be, among other things, that of “an amplifier” for social and political causes, and his approach to artmaking is closely connected to a concern with the possibilities of forging connections and the idea of togetherness. The exhibition and the two Tillmans publications that I am preparing (involving a Reader of his interviews, short essays, lyrics, and Instagram posts, and a comprehensive exhibition catalogue), foreground the ways in which this artist’s concern with the social, with activist causes (including feminism), and his ethics of care are inextricable from his ongoing investigation of what it means to make pictures. I like this quote, in which Tillmans says: “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment.” And then, “They’re also a world I want to live in.”

RS: A collection as vast as MoMA’s undoubtedly has gaps too. Within your department, what are some areas you are excited to strengthen and deepen in the collection? As a curator do you see this as an opportunity to leave a mark on the institution and build a legacy around topics you deem critical?

RM: MoMA’s acquisition strategy is grounded in the idea of the living museum model, the museum as an open system of potential relations rather than a storehouse of frozen facts, as a network of possibilities rather than a static formation. Careful observers of MoMA’s collection installations will notice an emphasis on women-centered and social-justice contents. I like to always take cues from the ways artists show us how to do the work of reimagining and remaking our existence in the world. Intersecting feminisms, hybridization of traditional and new media, performance, the digital/Internet, and Black, trans, and queer visual culture are at the forefront of my research. I’m also interested in transnational approaches that challenge and revise dominant art histories. I’ve been thinking in the past few years of the archipelago model, a postcolonial model of composite cultures developed by Martinican cultural theorist and poet Edouard Glissant (the reverse of the global and uniformization) as a path marker.

RS: You co-founded the Forums on Contemporary Photography at MoMA over a decade ago. Is there any one presentation over the years that was particularly memorable or that made you reconsider a topic in a new, unexpected way?

RM: There are quite a few. If we were to put all the forums together, it would amount to a critical anthology of the first two decades of the 21st century. Perhaps I should mention in this context just the last three forums, all from 2021, since each was a tribute to a feminist artist or feminist theorist of visual culture. In February, we presented A Tribute to Carrie Mae Weems, which I co-organized with Sarah E. Lewis, Associate Professor at Harvard University. The event was a double celebration—of MoMA’s exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems’s poignant work From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, which I had the honor to curate; and of the Carrie Mae Weems anthology, part of the October Files series, edited by Sarah with Christine Garnier, 2020–2022 Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow, CASVA, National Gallery of Art. In April, we convened the 50th Anniversary of Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Recognized as a keystone of feminist art theory, this incisive essay along with its 2001 follow-up reappraisal, “Thirty Years Later,” a text highlighting the development of intersectional feminisms during the 1990s, changed the makeup of art history by exposing the institutional barriers to the visual arts that women have historically faced. As a scholar and pedagogue, Nochlin perceptively expressed how art criticism and social activism could inform the struggles against systemic inequality and exclusion. I co-organized that forum with writer Julia Trotta (who is also Nochlin’s granddaughter). The event celebrated the occasion but also historicized and illuminated more recent shifts in the world (MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements) and the discipline of feminist critical theory that has made possible the understanding of Nochlin’s prescient interventions. In October I co-organized with my colleague Thomas J. Lax, Curator in Media and Performance at MoMA, Black Gazes, a forum dedicated to Tina M. Campt’s new book A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021) and of contemporary artists’ attempts to shift how we interact with visual culture by reclaiming discomfort, refusal, and the work of feeling alongside one another.

RS: It’s a wonderful book, I just finished reading it and it’s so powerful. What current or upcoming projects are you excited about?

RM: I am very excited by MoMA’s “Fall Reveal”—a new series of installations across three floors of collection displays. Within that context, I have collaborated again with Thomas Lax on the exhibition Critical Fabulations. The title comes from an essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” authored by Saidiya Hartman, a renowned scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose work explores the afterlife of slavery in modern American society. The text brings up the method of “critical fabulations,” which “troubles the line between history and imagination.” Hartman’s innovative writing illuminates Black stories that have long gone untold, that historical archives have omitted or obscured. This is the point of departure for this exhibition, which brings together artists Deana Lawson, Dalton Paula, Cameron Rowland, Tourmaline, and Kandis Williams whose creative use of archival materials, oral histories and historical artifacts reimagine Black futurity. Hartman’s essay was first published in 2008 in Small Axe, a Caribbean journal of criticism, in an issue on the archaeologies of black memory. We republished it in collaboration with Cassandra Press, a Black publishing imprint and pedagogical platform founded in 2016 by Kandis Williams. It’s all about the labor invested in the narration and acts of reparative Black futures that this exhibition buttresses.

RS: Thank you, Roxana. I look forward to hearing you speak at the upcoming WOPHA Congress and to experience the upcoming exhibitions and publications you’re developing.