Exhibition

A View of One’s Own—Three Women Photographers in Rome: Esther Boise Van Deman, Georgina Masson, Jeannette Montgomery Barron

Inaugural Lecture

“A View of One’s Own: Women, Walking, and Photography in Rome”
Peter Benson Miller, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
5:30pm

This exhibition, shown for the first time in the United States, is drawn from the holdings of the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome, and features a selection of photographs by foreign women in Rome from three successive generations. Their work confronts aspects of the Eternal City and its urban transformation over more than a century, from the Belle Époque to the present day. At the same time, it tracks the emergence of photography as an independent medium wielded by women with distinctive viewpoints, as it evolved from a documentary aid to a vehicle for subjective, even gendered expression.

The protagonists are the American archaeologist Esther Boise Van Deman, who photographed Rome and its surroundings in the 1910s; Georgina Masson, the author of a classic guidebook, The Companion Guide to Rome, that has shaped foreigners’ experiences of Rome since the 1950s; and the contemporary photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron, whose images capture glimpses of Rome as seen by an American living abroad in the Eternal City, folding them into a wandering, meditative reverie. Seen in succession against a photographic landscape of Rome defined for the most part by men, these photographs posit another way of seeing the city’s history. Taken by female flâneurs, empirical observations of bricks and mortar progressively dissolve into pure, evanescent experience.

A View of One’s Own is curated by Lindsay Harris, Peter Benson Miller, and Angela Piga. The Arthur Ross Gallery is the exclusive US venue for this exhibition and was organized by Lynn Marsden-Atlass. It will be accompanied by a variety of related programming, which can be viewed at http://ow.ly/t8BG30eOLo6.

The exhibition is made possible in part by Richard Baron and Adi Shamir Baron. Additional support is provided by Mrs. Arthur Ross, the Patron’s Circle of the Arthur Ross Gallery, the Provost’s Interdisciplinary Arts Fund, the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.