Dr. Barbara Norfleet and Dr. Alison Nordström in Conversation
Sunday, November 20, 4:00 pm
Members: $15
Non-Members: $20
The Griffin Museum is pleased to host a conversation between Dr. Barbara Norfleet and Dr. Alison Nordström. Norfleet and Nordström have been colleagues for many years. Both share an interest in social issues and historical and documentary photography. They will discuss Norfleet’s distinguished career exploring American social history via photography.
Bio:
Dr. Barbara Norfleet is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Focus Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography to be awarded on October 30, 2016. Barbara Norfleet, is a renowned documentary photographer, retired senior lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, and retired curator of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. She was trained as a social scientist, where she discovered a passion for photography and enjoyed a long and distinguished career exploring American social history via photography. Barbara Norfleet is one of the first to bring professional training as a sociologist to the study of photographs of everyday life. Her own work as a documentary photographer has been exhibited and celebrated in numerous museums. Norfleet grew up in the Philadelphia area and attended Swarthmore College in the early ’40s. She majored in economics and graduated with high honors in 1947, and went on to attend graduate school in a Radcliffe-Harvard program, where she earned a Ph.D. in social relations in psychology in 1951. She briefly served as a research associate, and began a 20-year teaching career at Harvard, first as a lecturer in Social Sciences and then in Visual and Environmental Studies. In the mid-’60s, Norfleet embarked on a dual career as photographer and photographic curator and scholar.
Her training in sociology enabled her to see the value in a type of photography that no one had paid serious attention to before – the work of professional photographers hired to document everyday events like weddings, beauty pageants, society balls, and local business openings. She understood that these photographers created social and cultural documents that offered both commentary and critique of modern American life.
Norfleet has published numerous articles and books on photography and its importance in documenting the details of everyday life, including, among others, The Champion Pig (1979), Killing Time (1982), All the Right People (1986), Illusion of Orderly Progress (1999) and When We Liked Ike: Looking for Postwar America (2001).
Her own photographs appear in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the George Eastman House. Among her many awards as an artist, teacher, and curator are a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography and the Aaron Siskind Award. She was an Honoree of the Fifth National Women in Photography Conference. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College in 2014.
Barbara Norfleet’s work as a teacher, photographer, curator, and writer has broadened the horizons of both sociology and photography. Through her photographs and those of others, she has brought to public attention a complex and moving vision of 20th century American life. She has given us photographs that enable us to see the rich fabric of modern life.
(This bio has been extrapolated from a Swarthmore College award ceremony with permission from President Rebecca Chopp who assembled the biography.)
Dr. Alison Nordström was founding Director/Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Florida and, until recently, was the Senior Curator of Photographs and Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. She has curated exhibitions in Canada, England, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, France, Finland, Switzerland, Australia and Samoa as well as many American institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, The Photographic Resource Center and the Boston Public Library. In 2011, the Griffin Museum awarded her the Focus Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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For more information please contact the Griffin at 781-729-1158 or email julie@griffinmuseum.org.
