Photography

Object Lesson: Aluminum Co. of America, Louis Klinkscales by Margaret Bourke-White

Object Lessons, Photography

Featured in NOMA’s exhibition Atomic Number Thirteen: Aluminum in 20th-Century Design, this portrait by Margaret Bourke-White illustrates the hard labor involved in aluminum production. Bourke-White was the first woman war correspondent and the first woman photographer to work for Life magazine. Her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of Life’s first issue in 1936, one year after she was featured in a monographic exhibition at NOMA. Read More

A Choice of Weapons: Photography, Surveillance, and Ethics⁠

Videos, Photography, Creative Assembly

Gordon Parks famously stated that photography was his “choice of weapons” against racism, intolerance, and poverty. While photographs have certainly been used to document and advance social justice causes in the past, the use of photography in recent protest movements has demonstrated one of the dangers of the medium. While protest photographs have amplified these movements’ messages and visibility, those very same photographs have been used against their makers by other authorities. This panel explored the new emerging chapter in the ethics of photography, considering how the digital, social world has made photography an instantaneous and global “weapon” that can slip easily from one hand to another, and offering guidance on ethical and inclusive approaches to protest photography.⁠ ⁠ Read More

Object Lesson: WATER by Edward Burtynsky

News, Object Lessons, Photography

To create the works in his project WATER, Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, born 1955) travelled around the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Ganges, weaving together an ambitious representation of water’s increasingly fragmented lifecycle. In enormous, color, aerial images, many bordering on the edge of complete abstraction, Burtynsky traces the various roles that water plays in modern life—as a source of healthy ecosystems and energy, as a key element in cultural and religious rituals, and as a rapidly depleting resource. Read More

NOMA Announces Major Fund and Pledged Endowment from Del and Ginger Hall

News, Press Releases, Photography

The New Orleans Museum of Art announces a major fund and pledged endowment by Del and Ginger Hall of Chicago, Illinois, in support of the NOMA photography department. The fund will support and augment an ambitious set of exhibitions and programs in the department of photographs over the next five years, while the endowment will provide a foundation for the department’s activities in perpetuity. Read More

NOMA Announces Transformative Gift of Photography from Dr. Russell Albright

News, Press Releases, Photography

Noted radiologist and art collector Dr. H. Russell Albright (1934-2017) bequeathed his extensive and important photography collection to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), and left a fund to create an endowment in support of the museum’s Department of Photographs. Dr. Albright had a long and significant relationship with NOMA, filling many roles over the span of 30 years, ranging from Trustee to longtime Fellow. Read More

Object Lesson: Kitchen Wall in Bud Field’s Home, Hale County, Alabama by Walker Evans

News, Photography, 2020

In the summer of 1936, Walker Evans and James Agee, on assignment from Fortune magazine, set out to chronicle the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South. In Hale County, Alabama, they found three families—including the Fields—with whom they lived for a month, with Evans photographing and Agee writing about their lives and environments, including this photograph from the family’s kitchen. Read More