Susan Taylor, the Montine McDaniel Freeman Director at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), announces the appointment of Russell Lord as the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs. Lord, a historian, curator, and educator who recently completed a Jane and Morgan Whitney fellowship in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will assume his new position on October 17, 2011.
NOMA’s photography collection was first established in the 1970s at a time when many art museums were not yet collecting photography. Today NOMA’s extensive collection of over 8,500 works represents a sampling of some of the rarest examples and greatest achievements in photography from the 1840s to the present. Among the many artists represented are Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen.
In his new role, Lord will be responsible for the care, interpretation, and presentation of NOMA’s wide-ranging photography holdings. In addition to developing exhibition programming that expands scholarship in photography and actively engages audiences, Lord will continue to acquire works that enrich the museum’s collection.
“We are proud to welcome Russell Lord to NOMA and New Orleans,” said Director Susan Taylor. “His interest in and study of the relationships between photography, other artistic media, and modern life are a perfect match for the museum’s mission of combining scholarship with accessibility and engaging a broad range of audiences with new and exciting exhibitions, publications, and public programs.”
Lord began his career as Curatorial Assistant in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department at the Yale University Art Gallery. During his course work at the Graduate Center,
City University of New York, Lord also served as Gallery Director at New York’s Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs.
While completing his two-year fellowship, from 2009 through 2011, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lord continued work on his doctoral dissertation, “Hybridity and Reproduction in Early Photography.” His dissertation establishes a broader history of photography that considers the role of viewing experience, public reception, and photography’s relationship to other pictorial forms.
“While my recent research focuses on early 19th century photography, I’m a historian with interests in art, culture, and photography from 1750 to the present,” said Lord. “NOMA’s rich collections provide a wonderful opportunity to consider photography in the context of other media and to study the way that photography has influenced, and been influenced by, other forms of picture making.”
Lord recently organized a show of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Photography: Intersections that explored photography’s relationship to other visual media. He also recreated Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo Secession from 1905 for Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs at the 2009 Winter Antiques Show in New York.
Lord has published widely on photography in national and international journals. This spring, his comprehensive essay on 19th century photographer George Bridges will be published in an anthology about the history and culture of the Caribbean, and he is also contributing essays for a forthcoming history of photography This is Photography to be published by Thames & Hudson in 2012.