What Is the Future of Photography at MoMA?

In February 2020, New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced that Clément Chéroux would step into the shoes vacated by his compatriot Quentin Bajac two years earlier, assuming the role of the museum’s Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. At the time of the announcement, Chéroux was senior curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Pritzker Center for Photography, a position he held for three productive years, producing two major thematic exhibitions that explored the intersection of vernacular and traditional “art” photography, including snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks (2019) and Don’t! Photography and the Art of Mistakes (2019), as well as a series of solo exhibitions by artists like Louis Stettner (2018), Carolyn Drake (2018), and Walker Evans (2017). (The latter, in fact, had been originated by Chéroux while he was still serving as chief curator of photography at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.)

In the year since Chéroux’s MoMA appointment, the social and cultural landscape of New York has been incalculably transformed by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic; the shock waves of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police in Minneapolis; the ascendant Black Lives Matters movement; and the 2020 US presidential election and its aftermath. Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin, spoke with Chéroux by phone in January 2021, just days prior to the announcement that his colleague at MoMA, Sarah Meister, had been named incoming executive director of Aperture Foundation. Martin and Chéroux’s conversation ranges from the radical changes on the streets of New York to the equally urgent new demands placed on institutions, artists, and curators, and their approaches to the photographic image.

Lesley A. Martin: Could you narrate your arrival to New York? In what must have been quite a surreal time!

Clément Chéroux: I started working remotely for MoMA in July, and I came to New York in the beginning of September. It was a very strange time to settle in in the US. New York was not the New York that I was expecting. The city that never sleeps seems to be under a very strong narcotic. I was really looking forward to being in New York and meeting with so many artists that I appreciate and follow. So one thing that I miss the most is not being able to do artist studio visits.

Visually, what struck me during these first months in New York were the storefronts covered with plywood. In the 1920s, exactly a century ago, Eugène Atget photographed the large glass window panels, which were relatively new at the time in modern cities. Atget took these photographs in Paris, not in New York, but for a whole century, the store window was the visible face of capitalism. Something has changed in the past years thanks to the internet, with merchandise mostly stored in large warehouses in the suburbs and out of sight. Now, with all of these windows covered with plywood in recent months, and especially during election week, it’s as if we’re clearly witnessing the end of something, a kind of symbolic death of this very visible and aggressive form of capitalism.

Martin: That phenomenon seems to be in tandem with the process of our entire lives now being lived through the screen.

Chéroux: Exactly. We have very different access to objects.

Martin: Your arrival also coincided with a particularly unique time politically—not just the ongoing pandemic, but Black Lives Matters protests, the election and its aftermath, and general soul-searching in relation to the nature of the American project. What are the obligations of an institution like MoMA to reflect on current events, and how do you feel this stance will impact your work?

Chéroux: This is something that my colleagues and I talk about almost every day. Personally, I was really shocked by what happened in Washington, DC, on January 6. That was a traumatizing moment. It’s important for a museum like MoMA to reflect on moments like this. Of course, we are working much more in the long term of history than in the immediacy of current events, but there is no doubt that what happened in the recent days or in the recent months will have a long-term impact on our future projects. I fully believe that an institution like MoMA must be a place where democratic principles are defended and reflected on. I also believe that photography has something to say in this debate around democracy. Photography is a democratic medium: everyone can take a photo, and everyone can have their own photo taken with the same level of detail. And of course, at the same time, you also have to understand that photography has been the tool of profoundly undemocratic systems. Photography has been used, for example, in the service of colonial power and as an instrument of domination. It’s not the medium of photography in itself that is discriminatory or racist; that responsibility lies with the individual using the photograph in a racist or an antidemocratic way. Photography is just a tool.

Martin: In your research and your writing, you are often drawn to popular forms of photography—the postcard, paparazzi, and spirit photography, among others. I’m curious how you see the tensions between “high art,” which traditionally has not recognized those forms of photography, and your notion of photography as a democratic medium.

Chéroux: Photography is a vernacular medium, and I’ve never been able to think about photography exclusively as an art. There has always been a tension between high and low, between this democratic aspect of photography and art-making. This is what interests me about the medium. In the context of what we are living through today, this issue of photography as a democratic tool is extremely important.

We are living in a world which is marked by violence: the violence of the pandemic; the violence of climate change; the violence of civil and political unrest, which includes the violence behind building walls; the violence of systemic racism; police violence and the refusal to condemn those responsible. I’m talking about the violence that denies equal rights to members of the LGBTQ community, the violence of refusing to accept the results of a democratic election, as well as the violence that stormed the Capitol.

In this context, for me, it’s more important than ever to strengthen what is at the heart of the democratic principle, which is the plurality of different voices. We have to reaffirm the democratic principle: the necessity of plurality, equality, and diversity. This is the conversation I’ve been having with my colleagues Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister, and Lucy Gallun. We have made a commitment to focus on questions of diversity. This is going to be at the heart of our program for the coming years.

Martin: I wonder if you could give some concrete examples of how you’re enacting those commitments, both for the photo department and museum-wide.

Chéroux: We have three tools as museum curators: You make acquisitions and build a collection. You make exhibitions. And you create public debates and conversations. In each of these, we will address diversity in terms of which photographers we work with and collect, but also diversity in the modes of photography.

The MoMA collection has long defined itself through the canon of the white Western male. Things had already started to change before I arrived, but we will continue to amplify diverse voices in the coming years—it will be at the heart of our acquisition program. This also goes back to my own interests: the diversification of the photographers we collect must go hand in hand with the diversification of photographic forms. MoMA’s acquisition history has had a particular emphasis on the photographic print as defined by photographers like Ansel Adams, who believed that the print was the final expression of the photographer’s visualization—Adams worked closely with Beaumont Newhall when the photography department at MoMA was founded in 1940.

But of course, photography exists in many other forms than just the beautiful framed print. Photography exists in public space, on screens, as installation; and photography also exists, very importantly, as books. We have to deal with that. We are into what the art historian George Baker defined in 2005 as the “expanded field” of photography. We want to do more around these questions. We want to do more in terms of public debate, acquisition, and exhibition.

In terms of exhibitions, in the spring, the French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada is working with Lucy Gallun on an “artist’s choice” exhibition—in which the artist is looking at the collection, working closely with the curator to create a selection in response to a theme chosen by the artist. Barrada’s thematic focus is the French filmmaker and ethologist Fernand Deligny, and she’s creating a fascinating program around the show. Also, in May, we will open an exhibition titled Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946­–1964, curated by Sarah Meister, focusing on São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Club Bandeirante—an amazing movement with important photographers such as Geraldo de Barros, Thomaz Farkas, and Gertrudes Altschul. The exhibition highlights the extraordinary dynamism of this Brazilian modernist scene between the forties and the sixties, and rewrites an entire chapter of the history of modernism and photography.

Martin: Do you see this interest in amateurism as important to your concerns as well?

Chéroux: Yes—it’s another way to rethink modernism. Usually, we talk about modernism through the great white masters, like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. This is a way to rethink that notion of modernism as taking place in European avant-garde circles; it also circulated in hobbyist photo clubs and other sites.

Martin: I think this all sounds very much in line with this proposition that you set for us at the beginning, that this is a time for thinking about plurality of both voice and form. As you know, the MoMA chief curator of photography has a reputation for having been “the judgment seat of photography”—a single perspective defining what is of importance in and to photography. Are you interested in deconstructing that idea?

Chéroux: The situation today is very different. The idea of the judgment seat also needs to be questioned in a historical context because, of course, in the sixties and the seventies, MoMA held a hegemonic position due to the fact that the program was relatively alone in the field, one of the only big museums who had a photography program. It’s not dissimilar if you compare MoMA’s position during John Szarkowski’s tenure with the position of Aperture, which was probably the main publisher of photography at the time. Whereas now, there is MACK and there is Steidl, and a lot of smaller publishers.

I’m happy to develop a program that aims to defend plurality. I’m also very aware that my voice is one among many. The previous generation of curators and historians, active from the sixties to the eighties, were trying to define the uniqueness, the singularity, the medium-specificity of photography. My generation is much more interested in the range and broad reach of photography, instead of being interested in its uniqueness. There is not just one photography but several photographies that exist in different contexts and forms, from the vernacular to art, from New York to Mexico City to Lagos. Our task is no longer about trying to define what is photography; it’s really about trying to share the most interesting photography in its different forms.

Martin: Similarly, MoMA’s curatorial vision has long been defined by these singular male voices, from Newhall to Edward Steichen, Szarkowski, and Peter Galassi—even though it’s not a secret in the field that there was a lot of heavy lifting done by curators like Susan Kismaric and Nancy Newhall, who curated the same number of shows at MoMA as her husband, Beaumont. You’ve mentioned the work by MoMA photo team members Marcoci, Meister, and Gallun. Do you see the way their contributions have been recently forefronted, as well as the role of invited curators like Barrada, as part of that ongoing effort to ensure that “the seat”—if there is one—is shared? That there are actually many seats?

Chéroux: Yes. It’s all about shared responsibilities, teamwork, and collaborations. I remember a letter from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Steichen, in which Cartier-Bresson congratulated Steichen on the Family of Man exhibition (1955). Cartier-Bresson told Steichen that he was a wonderful conductor. He used the French word chef d’orchestre. This is how I see my role as chief curator, especially over the next three years, as the calendar has already been set.

Of course, speaking of Steichen, there is a tendency to put Szarkowski in opposition to Steichen. Photo-history has always been polarized by these two figures—two different poles of photography—one very popular, and the other more conceptual. It’s as if you have to choose one side against another, rather than embrace a holistic approach to photography. I truly believe that the right position today is no longer to choose between Steichen and Szarkowski.

Martin: In this light, I’m really curious about what part of your training, then, as a curator in the history of photography, you think you have to forget or let go of—what ideas do you need to encourage others to let go of, in order to move forward?

Chéroux: I’m a historian—the most important thing for me today is not to forget the past. I want to work with it. It’s much more a question of unlearning, or maybe the right word, which you used previously, is deconstructing. (Of course, this a favorite word of French theory.) It’s not about forgetting, as much as trying to deconstruct the canons of a history that has been written in a model that was clearly colonial and heteropatriarchal. So it’s all about trying to find ways to deconstruct that model. This is essential—a huge part of what we have to do in the coming years. We must change the filter, and we must be much more attentive to differences. That’s the future at MoMA.