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News from the MFAH Photography Department from Curator Malcolm Daniel July 2024
Posted on Jul 17, 2024
Dear friends of the MFAH Photography Department,
With Beryl knocking at the door today, I’m taking advantage of a day at home to catch you up on all that’s happening in the Photography Department. In the meantime, though, I stopped by the Museum yesterday to pick up my computer and saw that the engineering and facilities team was hard at work preparing the buildings for the forecasted rain and winds. Ever since moving to Houston, I’ve been impressed by the Museum’s disaster preparedness plans and the dedication of the onsite teams who make sure that the art, the buildings, the staff, and the public are all protected from harm. I hope that all of you at home were well prepared and have come through the storm without damage. Hurricane season is just beginning, so we’ll all need to stay vigilant and safe.
Not every exhibition has site-specific wallpaper…
If you missed Thomas Demand’s extraordinary preview tour of the exhibition Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History for Photo Forum, you missed a real treat. Even without the artist on hand to guide you through, though, the exhibition is a remarkable experience. The same meticulous attention to detail that characterizes Demand’s photographs is present in his orchestration of the show—the sequence of spaces and arrangement of pictures, and yes, site-specific wallpaper for the first and last galleries.
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History
As you probably know (and might remember from our own Control Room), Demand’s monumental prints depict life-size paper and cardboard models created in his studio, most often based on scenes culled from the media and laden with historical or political meaning. But the show has other, lesser-known aspects of his work as well. The “Dailies” are based on his own iphone pictures of serendipitous bits of daily life—a paper cup stuck in the links of a fence, a pile of mail on the floor below a mail slot, an ice-cream cup left on a stoop—recreated in the studio and printed in a smaller scale; he thinks of the “Dailies” as a respite from the more complicated works, like a novelist who might enjoy taking a break to write some haikus. Not surprisingly, Demand is deeply interested in models, so another diversion from his primary work has been photographing architectural models and fashion designers’ paper patterns in a series he calls “Model Studies.” For me, the high point of the exhibition comes inside a specially designed, circular theater of red and orange drapery. Inside is a two-minute film, Pacific Sun, the most complex undertaking of Demand’s career. It’s a stop-motion animation of a life-size paper-and-cardboard recreation of a viral video taken by a security camera aboard a ship being caught in heavy seas off the coast of New Zealand. Demand’s film is both an amazing tour-de-force and kind of hilarious.
Thomas Demand (German, born 1964), Control Room, 2011, chromogenic print,
78 3/4 × 118 1/4 in. Museum purchase funded by "One Great Night in November, 2015," 2015.528 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History is on view in the Brown Foundation Galleries on the first floor of the Audrey Jones Beck Building through September 15th. Special thanks to those who have helped make the exhibition possible: Bobbie Nau, Matthew Marks Gallery, Kvadrat, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Jereann and Holland Chaney, and Joan Morgenstern.
Photo Forum 2024-2025…
Thomas Demand’s tour for Photo Forum capped 2023-2024 season, and we’ve got another exciting line-up of programs for 2024-2025. I’ve attached the full calendar of events for the coming year. It’s a great year ahead, with an exhibition preview, three superb guest speakers, a day trip to Beaumont, and our two important annual events—a look at major acquisitions of the past year and Vote Night. Look for all the details at the end of this letter. Photo Forum memberships begin at just $750 for an individual or couple and run for 12 months, regardless of when you join. For more information or to join or renew your membership, contact Ashley Powell at apowell@mfah.org or (713) 639-7594 or visit www.mfah.org/patron groups. 
Thomas Demand in front of Clearing during the exhibition preview tour for Photo Forum.
Now playing…
We’ve recently installed a new program in the video room of our departmental galleries on the second floor of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. A few of our favorites from past programs remain—Christian Marclay’s Telephones and Diller and Scofidio’s Soft Sell, for example, are just too good to give up (and thank you Jereann and Holland Chaney for those loans!)—but you’ll also find great new works as part of an hour-long looping program of time-based media. Two stop-motion animations from Mungo Thomson’s Time Life series that Photo Forum members might remember from the “Major Acquisitions of 2023” program are included— Animal Locomotion, a Muybridge-like sequence of body movements taken from the exercise pages of the Time Life books, and Sideways Thought, which weaves together thousands of images of Rodin sculpture. If the frenetic pace and flashing images of those two videos are too much for you, you might like the slow reveal in Tomas von Houtryve’s Divided, a three-and-a-half-minute aerial view of waves reaching the Pacific coast at the U.S.-Mexico border. And complementing the contemporary Cuban photography show that opens in September, Alfredo Ramos Fernández and Katarzyna Badach’s Surfing Buena Vista records teens “surfing” in Havana by grabbing on to moving vehicles coursing along the flooded streets of the Buena Vista neighborhood during torrential rains. A special shout-out here to the Henry Nias Foundation, which has given us grants in recent years to help build our time-based media collection, including the Thomson and Houtryve works just mentioned, Lebohang Kganye’s Shadows of Rememory, and Trevor Paglen’s Image Operations. Op. 10, which will play in Cullinan Hall in the fall when Paglen speaks to Photo Forum.
Tomas van Houtryve (Belgian, born 1975), Divided, 2018, single-channel digital video, black-and-white, sound, 3 minutes, 35 seconds. Museum purchase funded by the Henry Nias Foundation, 2024.311. © Tomas van Houtryve
Alfredo Ramos Fernández (Cuban, born 1964) and Katarzyna Badach (Polish German, born 1975), Surfing Buena Vista, 2012, single-channel video, sound, 3 minutes, 30 seconds. The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2022.626 © Alfredo Ramos Fernández and Katarzyna Badach.
Last chance…
If you haven’t visited our permanent collection galleries in the past half-year, time is running out to see the selection of pictures that Lisa Volpe chose for our rotating display, “A History of Photography,” (HOP21) which closes on July 28. Man Ray’s surreally mind-opening 1926 double exposure, Weegee’s 1940 photograph of a ridiculously crowded Coney Island beach, Paolo Patrizi’s picture of a murmuration, and Justine Kurland’s collage The Early Work (Excerpt) are just a few of the highlights.
And coming soon…
I’ve selected the next “History of Photography” (HOP22), opening August 9th, in which you’ll see several important new contemporary acquisitions that I’ve featured in previous letters, including: Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang’s The Mother as a Creator (2001-22); Alexandra Bell’s Gang Leader (2021); Dawoud Bey’s Shalanta (2003) from his Class Pictures series; and Jan Henle’s La Jíbarata II (1991-92); as well as 20th-century classics by Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Margaret Bourke White, Bruce Davidson, Jan Groover, Joel Sternfeld, and others.
But if you know me at all, you know that—yes, I confess—I do love all those little brown pictures from the 19th century (and not all of them are little or brown, darn it!), so this next HOP will have a deep representation of 19th-century photographs, incredible pictures from the Manfred Heiting Collection and many others acquired in recent years. Along with pictures on the walls, you’ll find cases with a rich display of photographically illustrated books and albums including major acquisitions we have purchased to build on the foundation of the Heiting Book Collection.
I’m always trying to pull our public and supporters back 150 years or so to those days when artists were first figuring out the potential of the new medium, but this display has a second audience in mind as well. In mid-October, about 80 or 100 curators, collectors, and dealers will come from around the country and beyond to Houston for the annual conference of the Daguerreian Society, an international organization dedicated to promoting the study and appreciation of 19th-century photography, and I’m hoping to wow everyone with what our museum has to show. Over and over during my time in Houston, I’ve seen people visit Houston and the MFAH for the first time and leave completely blown away by the city, the Museum, and the photography collection, and I’m hoping to open the eyes of a whole new crowd this October.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Daguerreian Society conference, trade fair, and related events, you can visit their website here. In addition, university students can attend the conference talks on Friday, October 18, free of charge by showing their university ID. The program of presentations will be posted on the Daguerreian Society website closer to the time.
Bruce Davidson (American, born 1933), Lefty Showing his Tattoo, 1959, gelatin silver print, 22 7/8 × 15 3/8 in. Gift of an
anonymous donor, 2023.739 © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910), Catacombs, Paris, 1862, albumen silver print from glass negative, 9 9/16 × 7 7/16 in. Museum purchase, 2023.473.
Coming soon to a screen near you…
Man Ray’s films, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L’Étoile de mer, and Les Mystères du Château du Dé, directed between 1923 and 1929, are among the most creative works of early European avant-garde cinema, bringing together experimental technique, surrealist narrative, and playful abstraction suffused with dark eroticism. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Le Retour à la raison, the Museum presents Man Ray: Return to Reason, with a newly recorded musical score for all four films by Jim Jarmusch and his band, Sqürl. The band’s cosmic sounds complement Ray’s work by conjuring the beautiful, ineffable, haunting, and sublime.The 70-minute compilation of Man Ray’s four films will be shown in Brown Auditorium Theater on Friday and Saturday, August 16 and 17, at 7:00 p.m. Get tickets here.
Switching roles but sticking around…
I’m thrilled to report that Raquel Carrera, who has been my partner on this coming fall’s exhibition and catalogue Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography and who many of you have gotten to know from her presentations at Major Acquisitions and Vote Night, has a new position. As we approach the opening of the exhibition and her two-year contract as a research associate in our department comes to an end, Raquel has been hired as a curatorial associate in the Museum’s Department of Latin American Art. It’s great news all around—Latin American Art curator Mari Carmen Ramirez gets a great new employee, Raquel gets to stay at the Museum, and we get to keep her as a close colleague. I’m sure you’ll continue to see her at our events, particularly during the run of the Cuban exhibition. Congratulations, Raquel!
Photo Forum Calendar of Events 2024-2025
FALL 2024
EXHIBITION TOUR: Navigating the Waves: Contemporary
Cuban Photography
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Malcolm Daniel and Raquel Carrera, joined by collector Madeleine Plonsker, will lead Photo Forum members on a preview tour of this exhibition of 100 photographs which traces the development of the medium in Cuba after the revolution and celebrates the Museum’s acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection.
VISITING SCHOLAR: Grant Romer on Daguerreotype Views
of America
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Formerly the chief conservator at George Eastman Museum, a world authority on daguerreotypes, and a famously engaging speaker, Grant Romer will discuss the underappreciated but considerable achievement of American daguerreotypists in documenting, outside the studio, the national life and land.
ARTIST TALK: Trevor Paglen discusses Art and AI
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Artist and author Trevor Paglen, whose video Image Operations. Op. 10 will be on view, will speak about art and artificial intelligence—how his own work addresses various issues related to AI and surveillance and how we can think about the role of AI in our lives, its future, and its impact on art practice.
WINTER/SPRING 2025
CURATORIAL SEMINAR: Major Acquisitions of 2024
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
In this annual event, the curatorial staff presents some of the Photography Department’s important acquisitions of the past year, explaining the factors considered during the acquisition process including the power and beauty of the specific photograph, the artist’s place in the history of the medium, the quality and rarity of the work, and its relationship to the Museum’s existing collection. Photographs from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries will be presented.
VISITING SCHOLAR: Kim Beil
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Kim Beil, a photo historian based at Stanford University and author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography and Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown discusses her creative way of looking at photographs and provides a peek into her next project.
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TRAVEL: Day trip to Beaumont
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Visit to the studio and home of renowned photographer and teacher Keith Carter, a Texas legend, followed by a group lunch at a local eatery, and a visit to the McFaddin-Ward Historic House Museum, a grand Beaux-Arts Colonial style home built in 1905-06. Further details announced at a later date. Limited to 20 people; priority given to Founder, Benefactor, and Patron members.
37TH ANNUAL VOTE NIGHT
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
At this always anticipated event, the festive climax of each year, Photo Forum members learn about photographs selected by the curators and vote on which of the proposed acquisitions to support with Photo Forum funds. This year’s event will again feature multiple rounds of voting interspersed with abundant food and drink!
In addition to the events listed above, members may be invited to bonus events, gallery visits, exhibition tours, or informal conversations with visiting artists and scholars.
Members will receive invitations with event details prior to each program.
Illustrated:
Liudmila & Nelson, Absolut Revolution – La isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island), 2002, The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, 2024.260 © Liudmila & Nelson; Platt D. Babbitt, Niagara Falls, c.1855, Museum purchase funded by the S. I. and Susie Morris Photography Endowment and Alexander K. McLanahan, 2017.122; Trevor Paglen, Image Operations. Op. 10 (detail), 2018, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund and the Henry Nias Foundation, 2024.69 © Trevor Paglen; Grete Stern, Dream No. 26: The Eternal Eye, c.1951, Museum purchase funded by the Anne Levy Charitable Trust, the JBD Foundation, courtesy of Nena Marsh, Joan Morgenstern, and Patricia Eifel, 2024.33 © Estate of Grete Stern courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires; Portrait of Kim Beil, photo credit: Austin Nelson; Keith Carter, Keith Carter, 2017 © Keith Carter; Tabitha Soren, Emailed Kiss Goodnight, 2016, printed 2023, Museum purchase by Photo Forum 2024 and Ken Frederick, 2024.102 © Tabitha Soren.
Schedule as of July 1, 2024. Schedule subject to change.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Photo Forum
Photo Forum, a patron group that supports the Photography Department at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was founded in 1988 and since then has made possible the acquisition of more than 500 photographs. Photo Forum is designed to bring photography collectors and devotees into closer contact with the Museum’s gifted curators and renowned collection through behind-the-scenes seminars led by the curatorial staff on a variety of topics related to the collection, special tours and opening receptions of the Museum’s photography exhibitions, talks by visiting artists and scholars, and visits to prominent private collections. Photo Forum members at all levels are entitled to cast ballots on works proposed for acquisition at the annual “Vote Night,” the celebratory climax of each year’s calendar. This ongoing program of activities has proven to be a stimulating and enriching experience for photograph collectors and enthusiasts, and Photo Forum has become a vital source of support for photography at the MFAH, helping the Museum meet its mission of bringing the very best of the art of photography to a broad public.
Membership Levels
Founder - $7,000
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• Private curator consultation by appointment
• May invite two guests to each program
• First priority for Photo Forum trips and private collection visits
• Four ballots for annual “Vote Night”
• An inscribed copy of each photography catalogue newly published by MFAH
Benefactor - $3,500
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• May invite one guest to each program
• Second priority for Photo Forum trips and private collection visits
• Three ballots for annual “Vote Night”
• An inscribed copy of each photography catalogue newly published by MFAH
Patron - $1,500
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• Two ballots for annual “Vote Night”
Member - $750
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• One ballot for annual “Vote Night”
Young Member (under 40) - $500
• Invitations for one to all Photo Forum member programs
• One ballot for annual “Vote Night”
For information about Photo Forum membership or to join or renew your membership, please contact Ashley Powell at (713) 639-7594 or apowell@mfah.org or visit www.mfah.org/patron-groups.
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News from the MFAH Photography Department from Curator Malcolm Daniel July 2024
Posted on Jul 17, 2024
Dear friends of the MFAH Photography Department,
With Beryl knocking at the door today, I’m taking advantage of a day at home to catch you up on all that’s happening in the Photography Department. In the meantime, though, I stopped by the Museum yesterday to pick up my computer and saw that the engineering and facilities team was hard at work preparing the buildings for the forecasted rain and winds. Ever since moving to Houston, I’ve been impressed by the Museum’s disaster preparedness plans and the dedication of the onsite teams who make sure that the art, the buildings, the staff, and the public are all protected from harm. I hope that all of you at home were well prepared and have come through the storm without damage. Hurricane season is just beginning, so we’ll all need to stay vigilant and safe.
Not every exhibition has site-specific wallpaper…
If you missed Thomas Demand’s extraordinary preview tour of the exhibition Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History for Photo Forum, you missed a real treat. Even without the artist on hand to guide you through, though, the exhibition is a remarkable experience. The same meticulous attention to detail that characterizes Demand’s photographs is present in his orchestration of the show—the sequence of spaces and arrangement of pictures, and yes, site-specific wallpaper for the first and last galleries.
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History
As you probably know (and might remember from our own Control Room), Demand’s monumental prints depict life-size paper and cardboard models created in his studio, most often based on scenes culled from the media and laden with historical or political meaning. But the show has other, lesser-known aspects of his work as well. The “Dailies” are based on his own iphone pictures of serendipitous bits of daily life—a paper cup stuck in the links of a fence, a pile of mail on the floor below a mail slot, an ice-cream cup left on a stoop—recreated in the studio and printed in a smaller scale; he thinks of the “Dailies” as a respite from the more complicated works, like a novelist who might enjoy taking a break to write some haikus. Not surprisingly, Demand is deeply interested in models, so another diversion from his primary work has been photographing architectural models and fashion designers’ paper patterns in a series he calls “Model Studies.” For me, the high point of the exhibition comes inside a specially designed, circular theater of red and orange drapery. Inside is a two-minute film, Pacific Sun, the most complex undertaking of Demand’s career. It’s a stop-motion animation of a life-size paper-and-cardboard recreation of a viral video taken by a security camera aboard a ship being caught in heavy seas off the coast of New Zealand. Demand’s film is both an amazing tour-de-force and kind of hilarious.
Thomas Demand (German, born 1964), Control Room, 2011, chromogenic print,
78 3/4 × 118 1/4 in. Museum purchase funded by "One Great Night in November, 2015," 2015.528 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History is on view in the Brown Foundation Galleries on the first floor of the Audrey Jones Beck Building through September 15th. Special thanks to those who have helped make the exhibition possible: Bobbie Nau, Matthew Marks Gallery, Kvadrat, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Jereann and Holland Chaney, and Joan Morgenstern.
Photo Forum 2024-2025…
Thomas Demand’s tour for Photo Forum capped 2023-2024 season, and we’ve got another exciting line-up of programs for 2024-2025. I’ve attached the full calendar of events for the coming year. It’s a great year ahead, with an exhibition preview, three superb guest speakers, a day trip to Beaumont, and our two important annual events—a look at major acquisitions of the past year and Vote Night. Look for all the details at the end of this letter. Photo Forum memberships begin at just $750 for an individual or couple and run for 12 months, regardless of when you join. For more information or to join or renew your membership, contact Ashley Powell at apowell@mfah.org or (713) 639-7594 or visit www.mfah.org/patron groups.
Thomas Demand in front of Clearing during the exhibition preview tour for Photo Forum.
Now playing…
We’ve recently installed a new program in the video room of our departmental galleries on the second floor of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. A few of our favorites from past programs remain—Christian Marclay’s Telephones and Diller and Scofidio’s Soft Sell, for example, are just too good to give up (and thank you Jereann and Holland Chaney for those loans!)—but you’ll also find great new works as part of an hour-long looping program of time-based media. Two stop-motion animations from Mungo Thomson’s Time Life series that Photo Forum members might remember from the “Major Acquisitions of 2023” program are included— Animal Locomotion, a Muybridge-like sequence of body movements taken from the exercise pages of the Time Life books, and Sideways Thought, which weaves together thousands of images of Rodin sculpture. If the frenetic pace and flashing images of those two videos are too much for you, you might like the slow reveal in Tomas von Houtryve’s Divided, a three-and-a-half-minute aerial view of waves reaching the Pacific coast at the U.S.-Mexico border. And complementing the contemporary Cuban photography show that opens in September, Alfredo Ramos Fernández and Katarzyna Badach’s Surfing Buena Vista records teens “surfing” in Havana by grabbing on to moving vehicles coursing along the flooded streets of the Buena Vista neighborhood during torrential rains. A special shout-out here to the Henry Nias Foundation, which has given us grants in recent years to help build our time-based media collection, including the Thomson and Houtryve works just mentioned, Lebohang Kganye’s Shadows of Rememory, and Trevor Paglen’s Image Operations. Op. 10, which will play in Cullinan Hall in the fall when Paglen speaks to Photo Forum.
Tomas van Houtryve (Belgian, born 1975), Divided, 2018, single-channel digital video, black-and-white, sound, 3 minutes, 35 seconds. Museum purchase funded by the Henry Nias Foundation, 2024.311. © Tomas van Houtryve
Alfredo Ramos Fernández (Cuban, born 1964) and Katarzyna Badach (Polish German, born 1975), Surfing Buena Vista, 2012, single-channel video, sound, 3 minutes, 30 seconds. The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2022.626 © Alfredo Ramos Fernández and Katarzyna Badach.
Last chance…
If you haven’t visited our permanent collection galleries in the past half-year, time is running out to see the selection of pictures that Lisa Volpe chose for our rotating display, “A History of Photography,” (HOP21) which closes on July 28. Man Ray’s surreally mind-opening 1926 double exposure, Weegee’s 1940 photograph of a ridiculously crowded Coney Island beach, Paolo Patrizi’s picture of a murmuration, and Justine Kurland’s collage The Early Work (Excerpt) are just a few of the highlights.
And coming soon…
I’ve selected the next “History of Photography” (HOP22), opening August 9th, in which you’ll see several important new contemporary acquisitions that I’ve featured in previous letters, including: Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang’s The Mother as a Creator (2001-22); Alexandra Bell’s Gang Leader (2021); Dawoud Bey’s Shalanta (2003) from his Class Pictures series; and Jan Henle’s La Jíbarata II (1991-92); as well as 20th-century classics by Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Margaret Bourke White, Bruce Davidson, Jan Groover, Joel Sternfeld, and others.
But if you know me at all, you know that—yes, I confess—I do love all those little brown pictures from the 19th century (and not all of them are little or brown, darn it!), so this next HOP will have a deep representation of 19th-century photographs, incredible pictures from the Manfred Heiting Collection and many others acquired in recent years. Along with pictures on the walls, you’ll find cases with a rich display of photographically illustrated books and albums including major acquisitions we have purchased to build on the foundation of the Heiting Book Collection.
I’m always trying to pull our public and supporters back 150 years or so to those days when artists were first figuring out the potential of the new medium, but this display has a second audience in mind as well. In mid-October, about 80 or 100 curators, collectors, and dealers will come from around the country and beyond to Houston for the annual conference of the Daguerreian Society, an international organization dedicated to promoting the study and appreciation of 19th-century photography, and I’m hoping to wow everyone with what our museum has to show. Over and over during my time in Houston, I’ve seen people visit Houston and the MFAH for the first time and leave completely blown away by the city, the Museum, and the photography collection, and I’m hoping to open the eyes of a whole new crowd this October.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Daguerreian Society conference, trade fair, and related events, you can visit their website here. In addition, university students can attend the conference talks on Friday, October 18, free of charge by showing their university ID. The program of presentations will be posted on the Daguerreian Society website closer to the time.
Bruce Davidson (American, born 1933), Lefty Showing his Tattoo, 1959, gelatin silver print, 22 7/8 × 15 3/8 in. Gift of an
anonymous donor, 2023.739 © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910), Catacombs, Paris, 1862, albumen silver print from glass negative, 9 9/16 × 7 7/16 in. Museum purchase, 2023.473.
Coming soon to a screen near you…
Man Ray’s films, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L’Étoile de mer, and Les Mystères du Château du Dé, directed between 1923 and 1929, are among the most creative works of early European avant-garde cinema, bringing together experimental technique, surrealist narrative, and playful abstraction suffused with dark eroticism. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Le Retour à la raison, the Museum presents Man Ray: Return to Reason, with a newly recorded musical score for all four films by Jim Jarmusch and his band, Sqürl. The band’s cosmic sounds complement Ray’s work by conjuring the beautiful, ineffable, haunting, and sublime.The 70-minute compilation of Man Ray’s four films will be shown in Brown Auditorium Theater on Friday and Saturday, August 16 and 17, at 7:00 p.m. Get tickets here.
Switching roles but sticking around…
I’m thrilled to report that Raquel Carrera, who has been my partner on this coming fall’s exhibition and catalogue Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography and who many of you have gotten to know from her presentations at Major Acquisitions and Vote Night, has a new position. As we approach the opening of the exhibition and her two-year contract as a research associate in our department comes to an end, Raquel has been hired as a curatorial associate in the Museum’s Department of Latin American Art. It’s great news all around—Latin American Art curator Mari Carmen Ramirez gets a great new employee, Raquel gets to stay at the Museum, and we get to keep her as a close colleague. I’m sure you’ll continue to see her at our events, particularly during the run of the Cuban exhibition. Congratulations, Raquel!
Photo Forum Calendar of Events 2024-2025
FALL 2024
EXHIBITION TOUR: Navigating the Waves: Contemporary
Cuban Photography
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Malcolm Daniel and Raquel Carrera, joined by collector Madeleine Plonsker, will lead Photo Forum members on a preview tour of this exhibition of 100 photographs which traces the development of the medium in Cuba after the revolution and celebrates the Museum’s acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection.
VISITING SCHOLAR: Grant Romer on Daguerreotype Views
of America
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Formerly the chief conservator at George Eastman Museum, a world authority on daguerreotypes, and a famously engaging speaker, Grant Romer will discuss the underappreciated but considerable achievement of American daguerreotypists in documenting, outside the studio, the national life and land.
ARTIST TALK: Trevor Paglen discusses Art and AI
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Artist and author Trevor Paglen, whose video Image Operations. Op. 10 will be on view, will speak about art and artificial intelligence—how his own work addresses various issues related to AI and surveillance and how we can think about the role of AI in our lives, its future, and its impact on art practice.
WINTER/SPRING 2025
CURATORIAL SEMINAR: Major Acquisitions of 2024
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
In this annual event, the curatorial staff presents some of the Photography Department’s important acquisitions of the past year, explaining the factors considered during the acquisition process including the power and beauty of the specific photograph, the artist’s place in the history of the medium, the quality and rarity of the work, and its relationship to the Museum’s existing collection. Photographs from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries will be presented.
VISITING SCHOLAR: Kim Beil
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Kim Beil, a photo historian based at Stanford University and author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography and Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown discusses her creative way of looking at photographs and provides a peek into her next project.
TRAVEL: Day trip to Beaumont
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Visit to the studio and home of renowned photographer and teacher Keith Carter, a Texas legend, followed by a group lunch at a local eatery, and a visit to the McFaddin-Ward Historic House Museum, a grand Beaux-Arts Colonial style home built in 1905-06. Further details announced at a later date. Limited to 20 people; priority given to Founder, Benefactor, and Patron members.
37TH ANNUAL VOTE NIGHT
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
At this always anticipated event, the festive climax of each year, Photo Forum members learn about photographs selected by the curators and vote on which of the proposed acquisitions to support with Photo Forum funds. This year’s event will again feature multiple rounds of voting interspersed with abundant food and drink!
In addition to the events listed above, members may be invited to bonus events, gallery visits, exhibition tours, or informal conversations with visiting artists and scholars.
Members will receive invitations with event details prior to each program.
Illustrated:
Liudmila & Nelson, Absolut Revolution – La isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island), 2002, The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, 2024.260 © Liudmila & Nelson; Platt D. Babbitt, Niagara Falls, c.1855, Museum purchase funded by the S. I. and Susie Morris Photography Endowment and Alexander K. McLanahan, 2017.122; Trevor Paglen, Image Operations. Op. 10 (detail), 2018, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund and the Henry Nias Foundation, 2024.69 © Trevor Paglen; Grete Stern, Dream No. 26: The Eternal Eye, c.1951, Museum purchase funded by the Anne Levy Charitable Trust, the JBD Foundation, courtesy of Nena Marsh, Joan Morgenstern, and Patricia Eifel, 2024.33 © Estate of Grete Stern courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires; Portrait of Kim Beil, photo credit: Austin Nelson; Keith Carter, Keith Carter, 2017 © Keith Carter; Tabitha Soren, Emailed Kiss Goodnight, 2016, printed 2023, Museum purchase by Photo Forum 2024 and Ken Frederick, 2024.102 © Tabitha Soren.
Schedule as of July 1, 2024. Schedule subject to change.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Photo Forum
Photo Forum, a patron group that supports the Photography Department at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was founded in 1988 and since then has made possible the acquisition of more than 500 photographs. Photo Forum is designed to bring photography collectors and devotees into closer contact with the Museum’s gifted curators and renowned collection through behind-the-scenes seminars led by the curatorial staff on a variety of topics related to the collection, special tours and opening receptions of the Museum’s photography exhibitions, talks by visiting artists and scholars, and visits to prominent private collections. Photo Forum members at all levels are entitled to cast ballots on works proposed for acquisition at the annual “Vote Night,” the celebratory climax of each year’s calendar. This ongoing program of activities has proven to be a stimulating and enriching experience for photograph collectors and enthusiasts, and Photo Forum has become a vital source of support for photography at the MFAH, helping the Museum meet its mission of bringing the very best of the art of photography to a broad public.
Membership Levels
Founder - $7,000
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• Private curator consultation by appointment
• May invite two guests to each program
• First priority for Photo Forum trips and private collection visits
• Four ballots for annual “Vote Night”
• An inscribed copy of each photography catalogue newly published by MFAH
Benefactor - $3,500
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• May invite one guest to each program
• Second priority for Photo Forum trips and private collection visits
• Three ballots for annual “Vote Night”
• An inscribed copy of each photography catalogue newly published by MFAH
Patron - $1,500
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• Two ballots for annual “Vote Night”
Member - $750
• Invitations for two to all Photo Forum member programs
• One ballot for annual “Vote Night”
Young Member (under 40) - $500
• Invitations for one to all Photo Forum member programs
• One ballot for annual “Vote Night”
For information about Photo Forum membership or to join or renew your membership, please contact Ashley Powell at (713) 639-7594 or apowell@mfah.org or visit www.mfah.org/patron-groups.
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