Femmetography: The Gaze Shifted is organized by the Schomburg Center’s Teen Curators, an art history and curatorial program for high school students. This year, our Teen Curators drew inspiration from Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s 1986 opus, Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers, the first book to document black women photographers. With this book as a guide, our young curators investigated the power of the black feminine gaze.
In Viewfinders, photographer and researcher Moutoussamy-Ashe collaborated with scholar and curator Deborah Willis to unravel the rich herstories of 33 pioneering photographers from 1839 to 1985. The authors’ thorough scholarship created a space for these narratives to be rediscovered and reimagined by subsequent generations. Described as an historical survey, Viewfinders not only looks at black life and subjectivity, but shifts the gaze to the lives of black women often never depicted behind the camera. Nearly 33 years after it was originally published, our Teen Curators critically engaged with Viewfinders to bring forth their own recreations.
The title, Femmetography continues the work of Viewfinders by engaging with photography from the perspective of the Black woman. Our Teen Curators explored the power of photography by creating portraiture, still life, and experimental photography alongside reproductions of archival materials from the Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe Research Collection located here at the Schomburg Center. By combining these images, a new generation of curators ask: What does the black feminine gaze mean today?
Curated by the Schomburg Teen Curators 2018-2019 cohort.
