This exhibition, drawn in part from the holdings of the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome, 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. It is part of La Quadriennale in città (16° Quadriennale d’Arte) and FOTOGRAFIA, Festival Internazionale di Roma.

The exhibition is made possible in part by Richard Baron and Adi Shamir Baron.

Exhibition Events

Inaugural Lecture
Zoe Strauss
The Photography and the City - Philadelphia
13 October 2016
6pm, AAR Lecture Room

Lecture EVENT CANCELLED
Letizia Battaglia
The Photographer and the City - Palermo
3 November 2016
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

Exhibition Hours

Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, 4pm-7pm
until 27 November 2016

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts and Humanities: American Classics.