Peter Galassi’s resignation as Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art marks the end of a long era of photographic modernism. Galassi’s curatorial choices have, for the most part, carried on the legacy of John Szarkowski, his predecessor and mentor, who established an aesthetic foundation for fact-based photographic imagery. It was Szarkowski who first garnered respect for photography among curatorial ranks when no one even thought it qualified as an art form.
As contemporary photography takes a more conceptual turn and artistic inquiry within the field is less tethered to the authentic moment, the legacy of photographic modernism, of which Galassi has been the reigning steward, is cast in narrower documentary terms. For example, Galassi organized the Lee Friedlander show in 2005, the largest exhibition of a single photographer’s work ever mounted at MoMA. Despite the fact that Friedlander’s work hovers at a perceptual altitude consistent with the most important artists of the last century, he is still thought of as a documentary photographer.
When Galassi organized the Jeff Wall show in 2007, it was a significant departure from MoMA’s modernist orthodoxy. Wall is a conceptual artist whose use of the photographic image lies in service of art historical concerns outside photography. The Wall show, along with Galassi’s acquisition of all 69 “Untitled Film Stills” by Cindy Sherman in 1995, signaled a broader view of photographic art making than his curatorial choices have ultimately borne out. Still, since Galassi took over the department in 1991, the annual New Photography show has proved a laboratory for curatorial exploration, confirming that under his direction, attention was paid to modes of expression outside the modernist tradition.
In the museum world, with ideology in ascendance, the photographic image is becoming less important than the “ideas” about photography it serves to represent. Galassi’s resignation, and the retirement of his longtime colleague, Susan Kismaric, earlier this year, makes way for new curatorial thinking at MoMA that will prefigure how the more conceptual work being done today will fall in place tomorrow. That said, the departure of these curators also leaves a chasm in the institutional knowledge about MoMA’s photography collection—regarded among the top three museum collections in the world. While a search committee is in place to find a new chief curator, time will tell how much of the modernist canon—and Galassi’s legacy—will remain intact.
Meanwhile, if Galassi’s resignation represents a paradigm shift in the museum world, in the marketplace another shift is about to reshuffle the deck when it comes to the value of photographs: Larry Gagosian has become the sole worldwide representative of Richard Avedon’s work, an art world marriage uniting two brand names that harmonize with a singular silver-plated ka-ching. One could argue that this is a good thing: Gagosian is the bluest chip of them all and the presence of photography on such an elevated plateau only confirms substantial regard for the medium in the upper reaches of the art world. In 1981, Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 set a record for the price of a photograph, at $71,000, marking the moment when photography became a valuable collectible. Last November, a print of Avedon’s Dovima With Elephants set a record at Christie’s in Paris: $1,151,976. Avedon’s work will likely become the most expensive in the field of photography, and just watch what that does to the canon itself.
