The upcoming Forum on Contemporary Photography focuses on a genre that has shaped social myths and redefined visual culture: fashion photography. Throughout the twentieth century, striking sartorial images tapped into collective and individual desires, often through cinematic storytelling. In magazines, on billboards, and in exhibitions, these pictures both reflected ways of rethinking identity and constructed social ideals of beauty, power, gender, race, and class.
In recent decades, a new wave of media platforms and technologies has been radically transformative, creating evolving spaces for emboldened attitudes of self-presentation. This Forum will offer varied explorations of both the fictions of fashion photography and its potential to express forms of social and cultural resistance through sustainable collaborations, queer histories of capitalism, and liberatory frameworks.
For this convening we are delighted to be joined by a group of distinguished speakers:
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Senior Program Officer, Creativity and Free Expression, Ford Foundation
Tina Barney, artist
Kaitlin Booher, William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography, Columbus Museum of Art
Elspeth H. Brown, Professor of History, University of Toronto
Sara Cwynar, artist
Camila Falquez, artist
Tanja Hwang, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA
Antwaun Sargent, writer, cultural critic, and Director, Gagosian
Collier Schorr, artist
Shikeith, artist and filmmaker
Pauline Vermare, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum
Nick Vogelson, Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director, Document Journal
This Forum on Contemporary Photography is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator and The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography, and Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, MoMA.
The Forums on Contemporary Photography are made possible through the Peter C. Bunnell Fund.