NEW ORLEANS, LA – The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place, on view April 26 – July 28, 2019. The exhibition explores photography’s complicated relationship to the places it represents, the places in which it is created, and the places in which we experience it. You Are Here both embraces and challenges the photograph’s role as a faithful record of place, examining photography’s successes and failures in rendering and sharing fragments of the world. Drawn almost exclusively from NOMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition traces a history of photography and place from the origins of the medium to the present.
“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.
Additional Information
- NOMA’s Instagram profile features a field guide to exploring You Are Here, led by exhibition curator Brian Piper. See more at instagram.com/neworleansmuseumofart or @neworleansmuseumofart
- #nomayouarehere
About NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art, founded in 1910 by Isaac Delgado, houses more than 40,000 works of art encompassing 5,000 years of history. Works from the permanent collection, along with continuously changing special exhibitions, are on view in the museum’s 46 galleries Tuesday through Thursday from 10 AM to 6 PM, Friday from 10 AM to 9 PM, Saturdays from 10 AM to 5 PM and Sundays from 11 AM to 5 PM. NOMA offers docent-guided tours at 1 PM Tuesday – Sunday. The adjoining Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden features work by more than 85 artists, including several 20th and 21st-century master sculptors. NOMA’s Besthoff Sculpture Garden is free and open to the public seven days a week: 9 AM to 6 PM. The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden are fully accessible to handicapped visitors and wheelchairs are available from the front desk. For more information about NOMA, call (504) 658-4100 or visit www.noma.org. Museum admission is free on Wednesdays for Louisiana residents, courtesy of The Helis Foundation. Teenagers (ages 13-19) receive free admission every day through the end of the year, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
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For additional information, contact Margaux Krane: 504.658.4106 | mkrane@noma.org
Gallery of lo-re images:
