Harvard Art MuseumsHarvard Square, Cambridge
The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection
How did photography construct cultural memories of postwar America? A University Research Gallery show drawn from the museums' American Professional Photographers Collection.
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You walk in and the first picture is the odd one out: a colour Polaroid of Barbara Norfleet by Elsa Dorfman, roughly three feet by two. Everything after it is small and black-and-white, about six dozen prints, most from the 1950s, chosen from the 20,000 Norfleet gathered from commercial studios in the 1970s.
These are pictures somebody paid for: weddings, bar mitzvahs, a Tupperware party, a back-patio barbecue, a Burger Queen. The wall texts read them as staged advertising for conformity, grouped around the postwar boom, suburbia and the fight for equal rights. Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe called the contents "an eyeful" and the wall texts "tendentious finger-wagging". Sponsored content, it turns out, is older than your parents.
It suits close lookers happy to argue with the labels. Entry is free, Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm, in the University Research Gallery until 9 May 2027. Free half-hour gallery talks run into the spring, including conservator Tatiana Cole on the gelatin silver print on 10 December.
Look for
Elsa Dorfman's Barbara Norfleet (1997)
The first thing you see: a giant 20 x 24 Polaroid, in colour, of the woman who collected the archive, presiding over a room of small black-and-white prints.
Bride with a coffee percolator (c. 1950)
Look for a woman in her wedding dress holding up an electric percolator, in one of the smallest prints in the show.
Clement McLarty's bride in a living room (1965)
A young Black bride stands front and centre; on the table beside her, a framed portrait of John and Jacqueline Kennedy takes pride of place.
Jack Gould's boy at his locker (c. 1950)
A boy stands alone at his open locker in an empty school corridor, with a nun in the distance like a hall monitor.
The homecoming queen (1955)
A football player kisses the homecoming queen, in the middle of the game.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want pictures without a lecture: the Globe's critic found the wall texts tendentious.
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Image credits
5
- From Iran: A Visual TestimonyAzadeh Akhlaghi, via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
- Harvard Art Museumsajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsBobak Ha'Eri via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Peabody Museum of Archaeology & EthnologyDaderot, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- Harvard Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0