“From early photographs of the Arch of Titus in Rome to our own travel snapshots, photographs have had a profound effect on the way we experience the world,” said Susan Taylor, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “You Are Here asks us to consider how photographs can remind us of the places we’ve been and provide new experiences of places we may never be. We are delighted to share this thoughtful and thought-provoking exhibition with our public.”
Photographs included in the exhibition range from some of the earliest salted paper prints of Jerusalem to mammoth images made using contemporary digital technology, tracing how photography’s evolving visual and material characteristics have influenced our understanding of place in different ways. Featuring works by a wide range of artists, including Lola Alvarez-Bravo, Anna Atkins, Eugene Atget, John Divola, Peter Henry Emerson, Gordon Parks, Edward Steichen, Carrie Mae Weems, and many more, You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place celebrates photography’s influence on real world place-making, while questioning how something as reproducible, two-dimensional, and mobile as a photograph can continue to stand in for something as singular, experiential, and fixed in location as the place that it seems to represent.
“You Are Here demonstrates how photography can be both facilitate and impede our understanding of the world, inviting us to think more deeply about how photography affects our experience of the world and other people in it,” said Brian Piper, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Photography.
You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is sponsored by George and Milly Denegre, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment.
