About Episode 80
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography at the VMFA, discuss in detail the acquisition process at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. They also delve into the collaborative efforts required to produce a large traveling exhibition, specifically A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, which is coming to the VMFA in October 2024. This episode reveals many of the inner workings of museum operations and helps to demystify the various processes through which artwork is acquired and shown.
About Dr. Sarah Kennel
Dr. Sarah Kennel joined VMFA in 2021 as the inaugural Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century photography, Kennel has curated, published, and presented widely on topics ranging from nineteenth-century French photography and historic photographic processes to European modernism and understudied women photographers. She has written extensively on the relationship between painting and photography in nineteenth-century France and, more recently, Kennel has focused on photography in the American South.
What advice do you have for emerging photographers?
This is my advice for anyone trying to find their professional path: cultivate curiosity and empathy in equal measures, explore the origins of your discomfort, and persevere through the inevitable shitty parts. Most of all, make sure that you are doing something that connects you to who you are—not who you think you should be, but who you are.
Is there a body of work by another photographer that has influenced you in your career?
So many artists have made indelible marks on me and change how I see the world. One body of work that has long stayed with me is Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves. I return frequently to its visceral beauty and power, its syncopated and fragmented visual/verbal poetry, and how the pictures can convey such emotional depth and complexity —tenderness, longing, desire, pain, alienation—in seemingly extemporaneous, unbidden ways. But the real truth is that I’m also probably so drawn to it because I grew up in Southern California in the late 80s, a period during which I was navigating my own painful adolescence, family dissolution, and attempts at rebellion. (I was a “good,” suburban kid but for a time I hung out with kids who were not). Jim’s pictures evoke in me a mixture of sadness, dread, shame, and empathy for my childhood self. Maybe that’s what all great art does—connects us to the world and to ourselves at the same time.
Artist Links:
People & Resources:
Emmet Gowin, Petra Chu, TJ Clark, Ruth Fine, The National Gallery, Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Andrea Nelson, Philip Brookman, Peabody Essex Museum, High Museum, Delacroix, Fine Art Museum SF, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Charles Marville, Sally Mann, Gregory Harris, Rahim Fortune, Aperture, Addison Gallery, Gordon Wilkins, FSA, Russell Lee, Peter Sekaer, Frank Raysor
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