Classes with Curators Series launches with in-depth history of photography

Gioacchino Altobelli, (Italian, ca. 1820–ca. 1879), View of the Arch of Constantine from the Colosseum, ca. 1865, Albumen silver print, Sheet: 11 3/8 x 16 in. (28.9 x 40.6 cm); mount: 16 x 20 13/16 in. (40.6 x 52.9 cm), Museum purchase, 1981 Morton’s Deaccessioned Auction Funds, 82.45

Interested in taking a closer look at NOMA’s collections? Want to take a deep dive into our special exhibitions? Join NOMA curators as they explore a variety of topics and take you behind the scenes in our new Classes with Curators series. Designed for small groups of no more than twenty students, classes are organized into three parts and are taught by one or more members of our professional staff.

This new program will launch on Tuesdays in March from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. with “Looking Again: Histories of Photography,” led by Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings. Each of the three class sessions will focus on a moment in the history of photography that is well represented in NOMA’s collections.

Registration is required. The cost for the entire three-class series is $100 for members; $125 for nonmembers. Please contact egreenwald@noma.org or 504.658.4140 for more information and to reserve your spot. Additional Classes with Curators will be offered throughout 2018.

MARCH 6 | ORIGINS AND EXPANSION
This session explores the origins of photography, the various media invented in the nineteenth century, and how photography quickly made its way around the world.

MARCH 13 | THE CASE FOR ART PHOTOGRAPHY
This session looks at the various figures that argued for photography as an art form from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

MARCH 20 | MODERNISM AND PHOTOGRAPHY
The final session examines one of the richest areas of NOMA’s permanent collection: Modernist photographs made between the two world wars.

About Russell Lord

Russell Lord is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. His deepest area of expertise is the origins of photography, but he has written and lectured widely on almost every moment in the history of photography. Lord’s recent publications include Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (2013), and contributions to Photorealism: Beginnings to Today (2014) and East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017). His recent exhibitions include Photography, Sequence, and Time (2012) and Something in the Way: A Brief History of Photography and Obstruction (2016–17).