Looks like at MoMA for the next few years, the drive will be toward breaking down boundaries rather than defining them.
Quentin Bajac, moma’s new chief curator of photography, is shaking things up. “I’m a bit tired of the predictable history from the daguerreotype to the digital print,” says the Paris-born Bajac, who comes to moma from stints at the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, where he was the head of the photography department from 2007 to 2013. Bajac is known for breaking down departmental boundaries and displaying photography alongside other mediums. His brilliant 2009 exhibition at the Pompidou, “La Subversion des Images: Surréalisme, Photographie, Film,” was as audacious as it was entertaining. He says, “I’m most interested in the connection between photography, painting, and film, setting up a dialogue and seeing that they have more in common.”
At moma, which has had a photography department since 1940, Bajac sees a need “to focus more on integrating photography with the collection as a whole.” Discussing his first show for the museum, “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio,” he says, “I thought we could work with the collection and write a history that would be a little different,” shifting the focus away from moma’s usual crew of Americans (Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand) and what he calls “that descriptive, documentary photography” that has dominated the museum’s collection-based shows in recent years.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/review...OAT_art_aletti
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