From left: Claude Cahun. Untitled. c. 1921. Gelatin silver print. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase; Ilse Bing. Self Portrait in Mirrors. 1931. Gelatin silver print. Joseph G. Mayer Fund. © 2010 The Ilse Bing Estate/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery; Berenice Abbott. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950. Gelatin silver print. Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler. © 2010 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, Ltd., New York. All works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art

In each gallery of the recently opened Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, you will encounter a wall of photographs (sometimes two) with only pictures of women. This is not because women focused their cameras primarily on their female peers—there are plenty of exceptional landscapes and photographs of other subjects in the Museum’s collection, and a select smattering of these are now on view—but rather because I, along with my colleagues and co-curators Eva Respini and Roxana Marcoci, were fascinated by how these groups of pictures of women and by women suggest, in their diversity, the plasticity of both photography and female identity. Read more

There are no installation views of the Projects exhibition in which Helen Levitt first presented her color photographs to MoMA’s public, for one simple reason: all forty pictures were projected onto the wall, fading as quickly as they appeared. The year was 1974, and Levitt was in the midst of a creative outburst—unusual not only because she was at an age when most people contemplate retirement, but also because until 1959 her career had developed entirely in shades of gray. I love these black-and-white images, and put up a whole wall of them in 2006-07, including the first photograph by Levitt ever acquired by MoMA, New York, way back in 1941. Read more