Why Should Anyone Care About Your Photography? Shana Lopes, E130
The MOOD Podcast
In this episode of The MOOD Podcast, host Matt interviews Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA, about the criteria and pr
Key takeaways
- Curators look for conceptual and formal depth in photographs, not just visual appeal.
- A compelling project must answer the question: 'Why should anyone care about this work?'
Main topics
- Curatorial decision-making in museum photography collections
- The importance of narrative and conceptual depth in photographic work
Notable quotes
It's like I've borrowed someone's eyes for just a second. And you can see the world through this entirely new perspective.
Conclusion
Shana Lopes emphasizes that meaningful photography emerges from deep inquiry, narrative clarity, and
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Everyone is a photographer now. Everyone has a camera in their pocket. What does it mean to make images anymore? And do we even need more images? It's like I've borrowed someone's eyes for like just a second. And you can see the world through this entirely new perspective. And it makes me lose my breath. Speaker 1 (0:18) This is Shaina Lopez, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She helps decide what enters the annals of photography history. Speaker 2 (0:31) It's a little bit of magic when that happens, when you know that something needs to be part of the canon and needs to be remembered. For a work to truly excite me, it needs to have layers, conceptual layers, formal layers. Speaker 1 (0:45) This conversation is about her as a working curator, on what she looks for, what she passes over, the questions every project has to answer. and advice on how we as photographers can succeed in getting our work noticed. Speaker 2 (1:01) Why should other people care about this work? Okay, so it's Speaker 1 (1:04) a Speaker 2 (1:04) work about your grandmother. Why should this other person care about it? When I hear the answer, well, I just thought it looked good. That's actually not like a great answer. If a work, if I just see a work and never think about it again, that usually means that it wasn't the right thing. It's expensive to make books. It's expensive to live. And it's hard, like, as... Fewer galleries are there and maybe it's just these larger institutions. Like, how do we get places for artists to be seen? I worry about that. I worry about how smaller galleries are not able to work and the nonprofit art spaces. and art colleges, some of them closing. Speaker 1 (1:42) Hundreds of emails, people going, exhibit me, exhibit me, look at my work, look at my work. And Speaker 2 (1:46) yes, the answer is yes, we do need more images. They do need a community and a community of other artists with which to run their ideas by. Photography is here to Speaker 1 (1:57) stay. What piece of advice can you give us on this side when we're potentially trying to get our work in front of you? Speaker 2 (2:05) So, I'm going to give you a couple of things that I would do. Speaker 1 (2:21) Shaina, welcome so much to the Mood Podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Speaker 2 (2:26) Thank you so much for having me here, Matt. Speaker 1 (2:30) Shaina, for those of you who may not know who you are, what you do, please kind of give us a nice little bio of your pedigree, what you do, why you do it, how you kind of got to where you are today. Speaker 2 (2:43) Hi, my name is Shaina Lopez. I'm an assistant curator of photography at SF MoMA. I was born and raised in San Francisco and I've worked at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. and the Center for Creative Photography. I have my PhD in art history with a focus on the history of photography. And I've been at SFMOMA for seven years, a little over seven years. I did have an internship there a long time ago. And so it's so wonderful to work at the museum that I grew up at. going to, it was in a different location when I was a kid, it was on Van Ness street, but it's pretty spectacular to be able to put on exhibitions now and be able to see, you know, friends from high school, old professors, um, and just people from all, uh, walks of life, uh, at the museum. Speaker 1 (3:42) And what does your job entail actually? Give us a kind of a little bit of description of what your, your daily life looks like. Speaker 2 (3:49) Every single day is so different for me. It's exciting and I'm so lucky to be able to do what I do. I'd say part of my job is part of my day. I do research on upcoming shows. I write the wall texts for exhibitions that I'll be putting on. I meet with artists and learn about new projects that they've been. engage with and also previous projects they've worked on. I mean, it's everything because I go, part of my job is also to know what's on view around me. And so I try to see all the exhibitions that are happening in the Bay Area. I also have to do the mundane stuff like email, which ends up taking up hours of my time. And I project manage my, you know, a lot of the exhibitions I do because there's so many moving parts. And as a curator, you're like the linchpin for all the other departments. It's because they're all working on your idea to help bring it to fruition. And so I may be meeting with an exhibition designer or our interpretive media department and trying to figure out what the goals of the exhibition are, perhaps. Yeah. What's the best way to get the narrative or the thesis across of your exhibition? Or I'm meeting with the framer to try to make sure we're on the same page about how many works need to be framed and how to make the object look best. Or maybe I'm having an installation meeting with the entire team, which would include a registrar, the framer, install point, and so a curatorial assistant. the exhibition designer, the graphic designer. And I work on several shows at the same time, but they're all at different points. And so I have a show that will be opening in January. So there's a lot of meetings currently about that exhibition. It's Ponte City with Mikhail Sabotsky and Patrick Waterhouse. It'll open January 23rd. And right now we're in the stage where We will be, our texts are going to be due in mid-September. And so I'm trying to outline what those will look like and what the point of each text is. Every aspect of an exhibition is intentional, whether it's the wall color, the way in which I hang it, the order with which we install. And so I try to be very mindful to not put up text for no reason. And so I'm really trying to think like, do we need text in these rooms? And so that's one of the areas. And we're trying to really, we have the design laid out, the exhibition layout ready, but there are a couple little tweaks that we're thinking about. So that's kind of top of mind. But really. My job is to, you know, be inspired by artists and be able to articulate those ideas and that same inspiration that I receive from artists to people above me and around me so that we can put on the best shows or perhaps we're thinking about acquiring. a work of art and I, you know, when I see a work of art that an artist is showing me, I of course don't want to get anybody's expectations up because it's not just me who has to decide when we acquire work. There's my supervisor and our director, the chief curator, and then our whole sessions committee. So there's layers to this. But when I see something that I truly love and believe that it would add to SFMOMA's collection, that it makes sense for SFMOMA, and that I think is really important for the history of photography. It's a little bit of magic when that happens, when you know that something needs to be part of the canon and needs to be remembered and part of future generations' understanding of the history of photography. And so I have to feel that passion for an object to be able to then convince all the others that need to that need to okay and approve what I suggest. Speaker 1 (8:27) You're at the forefront and the ambassadorship of photography itself, right? You feel that pressure on the weight of your shoulders to kind of represent not just artists and SFMOMA, but represent photography as a whole in what you're kind of choosing. And gatekeeping is the wrong word, but curating, obviously, the works that kind of get filtered through and which ones don't. Speaker 2 (8:57) It's such a privilege to be able to have this job. I didn't even understand what it meant to be a curator until I was 25, 26. It is a responsibility. And that's why I'm constantly going to shows, reading any periodical that's just come out on photography. I try to make sure I'm... in the know if there's an exhibition within like an hour's radius from if I'm going on vacation or yeah in a different city I try to see everything because that's and that's also the advice that I do give to artists too is to see as much as you possibly can because you never know when you're going to see something that will change the way you think or just shift your vision and when I when I see something like that it's like I've borrowed someone's eyes for like just a second and you can see the world through this entirely new perspective and it it makes me lose my breath like I get so um viscerally and just uh in my body I can feel it and so um yes it's a responsibility but I and I don't take it lightly and I photography it's something I never get tired of it's so it's so funny like I as a kid I would get tired of things really quickly I had lots of different hobbies and it was only when I picked up a photo textbook when I took a class at City College that after that like I couldn't put it down and it's because I think photography touches on Every single discipline out there, there's hardly a discipline that photography hasn't touched in some way. And so every project that I begin and every meeting that I have with an artist, whether it's someone at a portfolio review or someone, you know, who's established and represented by a big, you know, blue chip gallery, it's. um they all have something different that they're interested in everyone is interested in different themes whether it's you know um 1950s labor practices or um south african um history of apartheid like there's just so many different avenues and so with photography there's never been a moment where i get bored because it's all about the world around us it's um even if it's really conceptual then it's still then perhaps it um it relates to something else. It's always, there's something adjacent thematically that is new to me. And so I'm constantly learning, which is probably why this is the best job in the world, I think. Speaker 1 (11:52) Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography. That if you were serious about the work, you did it alone. You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did. But mostly I was just alone with my doubts. and no one to push back on them. What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop. It was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them. They got named. That's what I'm building with The Mood Insiders. It's a place where the work is taken seriously. where you can bring your questions and, of course, your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly masterclasses, Q &A sessions, and, of course, the weekly book clubs, and direct access to me and my team, because you don't have to do this alone. So the link is in the show notes, and hopefully I'll see you inside. Do you feel there's a, not a trend, I guess, a movement to more of the conceptual photography and certainly the more introspective photography, or do you still see, you know, the beautiful diversity, or should I say, is it kind of your goal to make sure there's as much diversity in the photography kind of exhibited works as possible? Speaker 2 (13:42) That's an interesting question because Someone was asking me, so do you love like, you know, documentary photography only or is it photojournalism? And I'm actually a pretty much a generalist. And I think you need to be as a curator at a collecting institution. If you're not, then you're shaping kind of a skewed history of the medium, right? You have to be looking at photography, whether it's commercial photography, scientific photography, anything. Anything that relates to image making is fair game to be at the museum, I think, because we're telling a history of the medium. I was just actually at the BNA, the Victorian Albert Museum in London, and looking at their American photography show. What was fantastic was that they had this one wall case that had records in it. And they were