This exhibition details a history of the extensive overlap between photography and writing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, photographers – and users of photography – have routinely found reasons to add a few more words into the mix for good measure. The exhibition includes straight-forward pictures of signs, deconstructions of letters into lines and shapes, conceptual artworks, photos of people reading and writing, inscriptions made directly onto the surface of photographs, and a variety of approaches to choosing a title. 

Show & Tell considers the ways in which photography’s capacity to visually represent – or show – our world, has been enhanced, manipulated, and sometimes limited by the inclusion of written text – to tell us something else. The exhibition reflects on how those two modes of communication can work in tandem, whether a union of photography and writing might lead to a richer kind of expression or, conversely, can distort our understanding. As the artists included in Show & Tell have enthusiastically engaged written texts as a central part of making photographs, the works in this exhibition encourage us to approach photography, text, and their myriad combinations, with a more critical eye.

Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and text is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is supported by the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund, James and Cherye Pierce, and the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment.