‘Labors of Love’
Students curate photography exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century portraits with renowned experts as part of Krane Art History Guest Residency Program
Professor Christopher B. Steiner’s class “AHI 250: Perspectives on Photography” recently worked with historian of photography Lucy Sante, an award-winning author and chronicler of early 20th-century America, and Natalie M. Curley, a prominent social historian and internationally recognized collector/dealer of vintage amateur photography and Americana, to study, interpret and curate American vernacular photographs from Curley’s collection.
The result was a student-curated exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century portraits and associated ephemera titled “Labors of Love: Work, Family and Play in American Folk Photography.” The project will be on display in the Charles E. Shain Library lobby until Dec. 15.
Steiner is the Lucy C. McDannel ’22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology and the director of the Museum Studies Certificate Program at Connecticut College. Sante and Curley are the inaugural participants in the Krane Art History Guest Residency Program, supported by a gift from Connecticut College Trustee Jonathan A. Krane ’90. The program is intended to introduce students to notable scholars and leading experts in the history of art and visual culture to foster interdisciplinary approaches to learning and bring to light the significance of inherited artifacts and material culture in the social construction of knowledge and history.
For the past two decades, Curley has aided museums and archives in rewriting a more inclusive American history by consulting and supplying images that document the experiences of the working poor, women and migrant, immigrant and minority labor populations from the alternative vantage point of their unique lived experience.
On Nov. 8, the exhibition’s opening night, Sante gave a distinguished lecture, “The Working Class Sits for Its Portrait,” in the library’s Charles Chu Asian Arts Reading Room. To complement Curley’s photos in “Labors of Love,” Sante presented an immersive slideshow of vernacular photos from her own collection, amassed starting in the late 1970s from New York City antique stores and flea markets and then, starting in 1997, eBay.
“The thing with all these pictures is that they’re wonderful [just] as pictures,” Sante said. “They’re also teasers on the narrative of [what is pictured]. You wish you had the novel that accompanies it, the memoir, the text of the life that leads up to this moment and away from it again.”
