The Lens

Originally published on June 11, 2020 by Artnet, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator Kevin Moore discusses why certain images stemming from the unrest in the U.S. are sure to be remembered in years to come.

The best historic photographs don’t just document events but carry a residue of the mood. Some even become an emblem of a cause—they become iconic.

Elaine Mayes’s photographs of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, for example, taken on assignment for... Continue reading Why Some Photographs Transcend the Moment in Which They Were Taken and Transform Movements Into Icons

The 2018 Biennial theme Open Archive sparks a multitude of thoughts and inspiration. Behind each curated show, featured photograph, and careful performance lie layers of narrative and woven experience, charged with texture and intertextuality. Which is why exploring the material behind this year’s exhibitions only adds to the intrigue—and the richness of the conversation.

Modular and multifaceted, the two-volume catalog No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff invites audiences to compare the three aforementioned artists in an open, flexible format. It juxtaposes the work of one of the most celebrated contemporary artists, the German photographer Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), with two important photographers... Continue reading The Biennial in Book Form: Three Volumes to Add to Your Shelves

Archives are both fixed and flexible. An archive is a record, but it can also be an account—a repository of objects that has the additional purpose of being a source of knowledge. And a photographic archive is still more elastic: It’s art, it’s history, it’s politics, it’s thought. Archives can be reorganized, appropriated, or entirely forgotten. They can be everything or nothing at all. This year’s FotoFocus Biennial theme is Open Archive—that is, the literal opening of archives, and also an open interpretation of what archives actually are and what they do. Unlike any other art form, an individual’s experience with photographic archiving is generational. From... Continue reading Open Archive: The 2018 Biennial Theme Looks at the Archive in All Its Forms

New York-based Artistic Director and Curator Kevin Moore brings two exciting—and distinctive—odes on photography to FotoFocus this year: Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Bernice Abbott, which exhibits at Taft Museum of Art, and Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks at the Contemporary Arts Center. In Paris to New York, Moore explores the relationship between American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927), who met in Paris in the 1920s and conducted comparable documentary projects. As you explain, when Atget and Abbott met, he was working to document the city of Paris as it was being modernized after WWI. Abbott became a... Continue reading Meet the Curator: Kevin Moore