Revisionist Images of Santa Fe A “Through the Lens” lecture

New Mexico Museum of Art Curator of Photography Katherine Ware speaks on "Turnabout is Fair Play: Revisionist Images of Santa Fe" in the next Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe lecture. Join her in the auditorium of the New Mexico History Museum at 6 p.m., Friday, Sept. 18, 113 Lincoln Ave.

Ware will discuss how images in the exhibition at the Palace of the Governors as well as the book, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe, challenge mainstream culture and some of the generally accepted myths about Santa Fe.

The event is free and open to the public.

Before coming to the Museum of Art, Katherine Ware served as Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she was co-curator and co-author of  Dreaming in Black and White:  Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery. While there, she also served as curator and author of Elemental Landscapes:  Photographs by Harry Callahan; and presented shows including Photo Mandalas, The Silver Garden; and The Faceless Figure.  Ware served as Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum during the 1990s and organized the traveling exhibition A Practical Dreamer: The Photographs of Man Ray and the exhibition Vision in Motion:  The Photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, both with accompanying books. She has also worked with the photography collection at the Oakland Museum of California and began her career at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in Washington, D.C. She is a frequent juror and reviewer of contemporary photography and has written essays on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.    

Since the 1850s many of the most recognized names in photography have focused their lenses in and on Santa Fe. Through their creative efforts they have documented a particular place and its visual history. They helped create that "place" and the mystique of Santa Fe. Photography has long been significant in the construction of notions of space and place, landscape and identity, and especially in Santa Fe, however malleable visual meaning may be, has helped define the geographical imagination. Curated by photographer and educator Krista Elrick and Palace of the Governor Curator of Photography, Mary Anne Redding, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe, examines the history of Santa Fe through the visual record created by internationally respected photographers.

Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe includes the exhibition (on view through Oct. 25), lecture series and book. Its sponsors are the Scanlan Family Foundation, Verve Gallery of Photography, New Mexico Council on Photography, New Mexico Humanities Council, Visual Arts Gallery at the Santa Fe Community College, Photography Department/Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe, Scheinbaum & Russek LTD., Santa Fe 400th Anniversary Partnership, Santa Fe Art Foundation, Andrew Smith Gallery, Museum of New Mexico Foundation, Palace Guard, Phyllis and Edward Gladden Endowment Fund, and the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico.