Where does this object start? What makes this object appropriate for a teaching museum? How has its function as a teaching object changed over time?
On Tuesday, March 9th, Dr. Makeda Best, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Art at the Harvard Art Museums, opened her talk with these questions. In a teaching museum, art doesn’t just look nice; it conveys a message. In the Harvard Art Museums, photographs serve as teaching objects—pieces of art that ask questions of their audience, causing it to reflect on the world and learn something new. Dr. Best’s talk, entitled Art Talk Live: Reframing Photographic Histories at the Harvard Art Museums, highlights the importance of this teaching. Her discussion was part of a series of talks in the museum-wide initiative, ReFrame, which is “an effort to make our thinking and our grappling with images very transparent and engage our public and the University community in that thinking,” Dr. Best told the Independent.
Dr. Best has always been passionate about photography as a means to conduct research and tell stories. As a teenager, she was captivated by the exhibition I Dream a World at the Oakland Museum and by Eyes on the Prize, a television show that used images to chronicle the Civil Rights Movement. Despite these interests, photography was never a clear path for Dr. Best as she grew up. Rather, she envisioned herself taking a more traditional route and becoming a lawyer or studying history after earning her B.A. from Barnard College. But instead, Dr. Best subsequently returned to school and earned both an M.F.A and B.F.A from the California Institute of the Arts. After earning these degrees, she recounts realizing that she was “more interested in thinking than making” when it came to photography. Dr. Best went on to earn her Ph.D. at Harvard, and in 2017, she took her current position as the curator of photography at the Harvard Art Museums.
Dr. Best lends a unique and crucial perspective to curation. “Photography, for me, is a way of organizing and understanding the world,” she said. She describes photography as a conducive medium in understanding her own African American identity and its experience throughout history. “How can I tell stories that change narratives and shed light on new experiences?” Dr. Best asks herself when curating artwork.
In her talk, Dr. Best displayed a photograph taken by Marion Post Wolcott, Cashiers Paying Off Cotton Pickers, Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi, which arrived at Harvard in the early 1970s to serve as a teaching object. The image displays two clerks dispensing vouchers for the plantation store to cotton pickers. The viewer’s perspective is of the person whose hand is coming through the small opening in the window, taking their voucher. As Dr. Best explained, this person, a cotton picker with a low level of literacy, faces a room full of stacks of paper, unable to read any of them. The voucher is for the cotton picker to spend at the store of their employer. But their inability to read precludes them from knowing if this amount of money accurately reflects the work they have done, said Dr. Best. She also pointed out the bar in the image covering the eyes of cotton pickers transacting with the clerks.
“This image, to me, is inspiring not because it is necessarily the most famous image that [Wolcott] made in our collection, but it is the only one like it in our collection. So all of the sudden, you pay attention to it,” Dr. Best said. “That’s how the University collection is. There are odd objects that aren’t necessarily the most well-known, but they are teaching objects. They invite this kind of conversation. They invite this kind of reflection.”
The same type of troubling reflection persists in another image that Dr. Best showed her audience: Devin in Red Socks by Eliot Jerome Brown Jr. In this photograph, an African American man stands, facing away from the camera, holding a towel to cover every part of his body besides his red socks. By covering the man’s face, Brown refuses the viewer’s access to the image and highlights a narrative where African Americans lack agency, explained Dr. Best. The red socks reveal that the person depicted is an individual—but a hidden one. This speaks to the history of African Americans’ representation in our society: “they are not the makers,” said Dr. Best. However, Brown’s image reclaims society’s gaze in a powerful statement that counters the ways African Americans have been documented throughout history. Before this photograph entered the Harvard Art Museums, the photography collection did not contain many images of people of African descent, Dr. Best noted. “Every curator brings a different perspective, and this is the perspective that I am bringing,” she said.
And what can a woman’s perspective lend to photography? “I don’t know if it is necessarily a women’s eye, but there is such a thing as a perspective that is marginalized,” Dr. Best articulated in response to this question. “That’s what I bring to my work—an awareness of what it’s like to be marginalized.” As an African American woman, Dr. Best identifies a marginalized perspective and curates photographs that ignite conversations about hidden histories. “Am I saying that someone who is marginalized can’t understand? No, I am saying that my way into the image comes from a subject position in society. Whether it is a woman or African American, we bring our place in society into the image,” she reflected.
In her conversation with the Independent, Dr. Best referenced an image she showed in the symposium Troubling Images: Curating Collections of Historical Photographs on February 26th. The image depicts cafeteria workers here at Harvard in Memorial Hall. All of the people in the image are African American, revealing deep-rooted issues with class and marginalization in our country. As Dr. Best suggested, the way we interact with and perceive photographs is dynamic and ever-changing as time passes. If a similar image was taken today, what would it look like? How much has truly changed?
Grace von Oiste ’24 (gvonoiste@college.harvard.edu) hopes to eventually take Dr. Best’s “Photography & Ecology class” at the College.