Over the course of a year (January 2024-2025), I curated Face Value for the Hartnett and Frontispace Galleries at the University of Rochester. The show is comprised of 590 photographs from the collection of Rochester professor, Nigel Maister, who owns more than 15,000 photographs. For the show, I cataloged exhibition items, mounted photographs in frames, ordered frames, wrote 70+ pages of exhibition text, completed label design, and installed the show myself.
Face Value: The Uses of Portraiture explores the evolving meaning of photographic portraiture throughout the history of the medium—from a daguerreotype embedded in a piece of Victorian hair jewelry and to early 20th century popular forms like the tintype and photo booths to the conceptual practices of contemporary portraiture. In each of the 500 photographs in this exhibition, we pose the following critical questions: What does portraiture do? Who is it for? Why photography? Where does it transport us? The exhibition is presented in two sections: Conversations in the Hartnett Gallery and Identities in the Frontispace.
Face Value: Conversations juxtaposes what is typically understood as “art” portraiture—from artists like Zanele Muholi, Pieter Hugo, Sally Mann, and more—with more amateur or commercial approaches to the medium, such as 19th and 20th century studio portraiture. By pairing photographs rarely shown together in the context of a single photography exhibit, Face Value adopts a critical curatorial approach that bridges the diverse histories of photography, as seen through the lenses of amateurs, working commercial photographers, academics, and art institutions alike. The exhibit loosely follows themes, ranging from the body to non-human portraiture. It begins with a focus on adornments and what they say about subjects and the time and society in which they live and concludes with representations of injury and disability. This thematic arc highlights how photographic portraiture has been used to document, control, represent, memorialize, and treat its subjects. Often, a single portrait embodies multiple roles, operating
in these different registers simultaneously.
in these different registers simultaneously.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from Conversations is the idea that the categories of “art” and “vernacular” photography might be dissolved, and in doing so, we make space for a richer understanding of photographic portraiture without the constraints of genre. The exhibition encourages and guides the viewer to extend conversations between individual images, genres, and time periods.
