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: Identities tackles the role photographic portraiture plays in constituting individual and collective identities. Here, we present groupings of photo booth images, mugshots, panoramas, Polaroids, and yearbook portraits. In each grouping, photography is used to define, categorize, and sometimes conceal a subject's identity through the conventions associated with their respective photographic acts or situations. For instance, mugshots and employee identification badges impose the identity of “incarcerated person” or “worker.” In other cases, the sitter’s identity is more ambiguously crafted, such as with the portraits of individuals partaking in the performative atmosphere of photo booths.
Identities invites the viewer to step back and to consider some of these groupings, not as collections of individual images, but as singular, unique works of art created from typologies, reproducing the grid form much in the way Bernd and Hilla Becher’s groundbreaking grids defined the Düsseldorf School of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The ultimate aim of Identities is to expose how photographic portraiture serves as a tool for categorization and the imposition of identities on ordinary people, even as some of them contemplate and shape their own notions of self. Whether imposed by the state, by an organization, or self determined, photography can be used to conceal as much as to reveal. Additionally, the public-facing and the private self is explored, problematizing the interplay between subject, photographer, and viewer, as well as the various types of agency present in the construction of a photograph.
