Unearthing Sandra Matthews

Unearthing

Sandra Matthews February 17 - June 2, 2024

Table of Contents Curatorial Introduction

by Jessica Roscio, Danforth Art Museum Director and Curator, pp 4-5

Images: Family Panoramas, pp 6-9 Homeland Scrolls, pp 10-15 Present Moments, pp 16-25 Occupying Massachusetts, pp26-35 Animal/Vegetable/Mineral, pp 36-41

Essays Sandra Matthews, Retrospective Thoughts, pp 42-47 Laura Wexler, The State We’re In, pp 48-50 S. Billie Mandle, Un-doing Photography, pp 51-55

Catalog Design: Laura Gayton, Danforth Art Museum

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e often look at photographs as representing distinct moments in time. The camera captures a person or place, and time stops as a moment is preserved. But photography is not a static medium.

It is a mechanism that has always been used to record how time passes, creating documents that bridge the past and the present. One photograph can tell the story of decades, or centuries. This is how Sandra Matthews uses the camera. Her works visualize layers of time and translate them into intricate images with powerful narratives that uncover our past. Unearthing looks at five series, created from the mid-1980s to today, which explore how we encounter and process complex histories, represent the passage of time, and define our relationship to place.

The exhibition begins with the Family Panoramas, works from the mid-to-late 1980s. Unlike the rest of the works in the exhibition, they are pieced together by hand to make layers blending family and landscape and voice surreal narratives. The process of cutting and pasting to create the layering are key to understanding how Matthews

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pictures history, and these are foundational works. Homeland Scrolls intensify the focus on the passage of time and the impact we have on the land. They merge text and image and ask us to think about what we leave behind, and the marks we leave on the land. Present Moments is a monumental project focusing on familial generations that tracks how time changes families and the individuals within. Occupying Massachusetts returns to the land, and confronts fundamental ideas of home, history, and ownership. Is home a place, an idea, or both, and who can claim a space as theirs? Lastly, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, merges landscape, bodies, and the passage of time to ponder some of the most essential aspects of our existence.

Sandra Matthews has referred to the ritual of how we occupy places as “fashioning sites of meaning”. Creating a “site of meaning” instills importance in our actions and considers one’s relationship with the land, people, and places that make up our world. A site of meaning can represent centuries of history. The photograph seeks to bridge those moments, telling the story one image at a time.

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Family Panoramas and Homeland Scrolls: Layers of History and Land An artist’s ideas build upon each other as a career progresses, and the works in this exhibition have visible roots in Sandra Matthews’ earliest works. In series aptly titled, Space/Play and Figure/Ground, Matthews experiments with perspective using juxtapositions and composites. She breaks up pictures to create the illusion that we are looking at two distinct events within one image.

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Recording the passage of time has always been integral to her work, and the Family Panoramas, made in the years following the birth of her first child in 1982, are both a time capsule and part of a continuous narrative.

These hand-pieced collages explore the complex and frightening world a child enters at birth, a situation that transcends time. Matthews’ use of the panorama format suggests “an all-embracing natural landscape,” but there is anxiety in these works, and uncertainty over what lies beyond the image. The Family Panoramas plant the seeds for series like Present Moments, photographs that visit their subjects at different stages of their lives within the space of one image.

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The land is a more silent actor in Matthews’ work, but it is crucially important. The Homeland Scrolls are composites that draw connections between the physical environment and past human actions. Each work layers three separate landscapes, with words embedded to create disorienting and ambiguous spaces.

Matthews describes a homeland as, “a place, both mythical and actual, to which one can feel a deep attachment, a place to which one might long to return...

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Yet every actual piece of land, whatever its nationality, has layers of complicated human history embedded in it.”We often evoke the landscape in the language of ownership with a veneer of sentimentality, implying that if something is in the past we do not need to revisit it, and we can paint its absence with nostalgia. But that is not telling the full story of the landscape. Matthews’ Homeland Scrolls, similar to her more recent works in Occupying Massachusetts, undercut a sentimental response to the landscape of history, while suggesting a multidimensional relationship to the physical environment.

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Margaret and Jennifer in 1972 / Jennifer and Margaret in 2013

Present Moments

Now, Then, and Again Present Moments is work that that clearly addresses the motivations and process behind Sandra Matthews’ photography. These works are monumental yet minimal in their approach. There are no extraneous elements or visible layers, just figures, often looking directly at the camera and claiming their space. Sometimes the figures appear against a blank background, sometimes in a landscape, but they are mostly seen against a backdrop of newspaper clippings. References to the passage of time are inescapable.

Ibi in 1989 / Ibi in 2007

Freya in 2010 / Freya in 2018

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Jaimee and Cheryl in 1982 / Cheryl and Jaimee in 2011

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Top: Jill in 1980 / Jill in 2010; Below left: Amira and Nancy in 1989 / Amira and Samari in 2008; Below right: Cliff in 1990

0 / Cliff in 2012

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These works evolved over time into the project they eventually became.

Their origins were almost accidental. Matthews started photographing women in the late 1980s in front of a newspaper backdrop, while thinking about public space, private life, and women’s roles—important themes that appear in her earlier works. However well-planned, the series was not evolving the way she hoped, so she put the existing images in a box and forgot about them. Twenty years later she found them, and realized she was still connected to many of the people in the original works. So, she made new, updated newspaper backdrops, with stories contemporary to when the portraits were made, and re-photographed her subjects.

The final works, 12 of which appear in this exhibition, appear in a number of differing configurations—sometimes it is a single figure with years passed in-between, sometimes multiple generations are represented.

We see the artist’s parents age, we see her daughter grow up. We see family dynamics change through shifting body language. We see groupings that add or subtract a member. All leave us with the question of what happened in those in-between years. The in-between is what the camera cannot capture.

Below: Sam, Lily, and Emma in 2010 / Sam and Emma in 2018; Above right: Helen with children (Ibi center) in 1930 / Ibi in 2010; Below right: Sandra, Rina, and Ibi in 2007

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Gabriel pregnant with Isabel in June 2012 / Isabel and Gabriel in September 2012

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Brown and Gabriel in 1989 / Gabriel in 2008

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On Wampanoag and Massachusett homelands. A reconstructed wetu at Plimoth Patuxet Museums. Plymouth, also known as Patuxet, 2019

Occupying Massachusetts: Picturing Place and Home The title of this series, Occupying Massachusetts, references the fact that the land we are standing on right now has been inhabited for more than 13,000 years, and “people have been building shelters and fashioning sites of meaning on its land since long before the United States of America was even imagined.” As a longtime occupant/occupier of Massachusetts, Matthews aims to understand more deeply the land on which she lives. Her photographs picture “idiosyncratic human constructions,” which is an expansive way of describing the range of what she has photographed across the state, including structures that are domestic, agricultural, religious, and commercial. Regardless of who made them and when, they were made by human hands with the goal of asserting a claim on territory, culture, and history.

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This series began a few years ago in a different vein, and like Matthews’ previous work, it evolved into a more complex meditation on picturing the passage of time. The works initially sought to depict more literally the structures and shelters we construct that we call home, and how they reflect our ideas about care and security. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard has referred to a house as “our corner of the world.”

No matter how unassuming, we can find beauty in a dwelling that we make our own. A home is constructed with the intent to shelter us from the perils of the larger world, whether or not that is the result. Occupying Massachusetts advances the initial series to extend the idea of home beyond a structure to encompass the land and history, and to tell a larger and more inclusive story about whose histories are told and how they change over time.

On Nipmuc and Pocumtuck homelands. Mount Holyoke and ice fishing at the Oxbow of the Connecticut/Kwintekw River.

Northampton, also known as Nonotuck, 2017

On Pentucket/Pawtucket homelands. A traditional wetu, constructed for educational purposes. Ipswich, 2017

On Nipmuc and Pocumtuck homelands. Hatfield, also known as Capawonk, 2015

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On Nipmuc and Pocumtuck homelands. Hatfield, also known as Capawonk, 2019 (see p. 34)

On Pentucket/Pawtucket homelands. Ladder house, ca. 1677. Rowley, 2017

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On Nipmuc homelands. Entrance to a spherical chamber, built between 1300 and 1600 CE. Upton, 2019

On Pennacook Abenaki homelands. Gill, also known as Peskeompskut, 2019 (see p. 34)

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On Nipmuc and Pocumtuck homelands. Hadley, also known as Norwottuck, 2016

On Wampanoag homelands. Plymouth, also known as Patuxet, 2020 (see p. 35)

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On Pentucket/Pawtucket homelands. A traditional wetu, constructed for educational purposes. Ipswich, 2017

On Wampanoag homelands. A traditional wetu on the grounds of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Museum. Mashpee, 2019

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On Nipmuc and Pocumtuck homelands. Leverett, 2018

On Pentucket/Pawtucket homelands. Ladder house, ca. 1677. Rowley, 2017

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Clarification of Text on Markers (pp 29-31

HATFIELD. Before 1870 part of Hadley. Thrice attacked by Indians during King Philip’s War. Marker installed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Commission in 1930.

Captain William Turner with 145 men surprised and destroyed over 300 Indians encamped at this place May 19, 1676.

Marker installed by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in 1900.

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After the Pilgrim’s arrival, Native Americans in New England grew increasingly frustrated with the English settlers’ abuse and treachery. Metacomet (King Philip), a son of the Wampanoag sachem known as the Massasoit (Ousamequin), called upon all Native people to unite to defend their homelands against encroachment.

The resulting ‘King Philip’s War’ lasted from 1675-1676.

Metacomet was murdered in Rhode Island in August 1676, and his body was mutilated. His head was impaled on a pike and was displayed near this site for more than 20 years. One hand was sent to Boston, the other to England. Metacomet’s wife and son, along with the families of many of the Native American combatants, were sold into slavery in the West Indies by the English victors.

Marker installed by the United American Indians of New England in 1998.

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Coming Full Circle: Animal/Vegetable/Mineral This most recent work continues to follow the theme of visualizing time that has always been present in Matthews’ work, but it takes a more universal approach. In creating groupings that pair largely natural materials, often in the process of returning to the earth, she asks what kinds of intimate conversations are possible among animals, vegetables, and minerals? She inquires how different forms

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of life at different stages relate to each other and to inanimate substances in the land. In striking images that juxtapose animals, fossils, and the anatomic elements of historical works of art, she explores how life transitions. All of us inhabit a body in its own unique form, and we very likely find it difficult to think about the process of returning to the earth. These works are enigmatic, but they are how Matthews brings a sense of clarity to the mysterious processes that happen all around us, as well as the future we have no way of knowing.

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Essays: 42

Laura Wexler, Sandra Matthews, S. Billie

Photo: Norbert Goldfield

Mandle

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Retrospective Thoughts Sandra Matthews Jessica Roscio’s thoughtful selection of works for this exhibition has given me a chance to look back across five projects (Family Panoramas, Homeland Scrolls, Present Moments, Occupying Massachusetts, and Animal/Vegetable/Mineral) made over a 40 year period, and to see them in relation to each other in new ways. I see several themes running through these five projects – one of which is the theme of hidden histories. Whether there are layers of history in the land (as in Occupying Massachusetts or the Homeland Scrolls) or personal narratives being held in the body (as in the Present Moment portraits and the early Family Panoramas), my work often suggests the presence of stories which are implied but not explicitly told.

Rather than tell stories, I aim to communicate a kind of felt history that I hope can connect with each viewer’s individual experience.

For example, it pleases me to have heard from some viewers that seeing the Occupying Massachusetts photographs caused a change in their feelings about the landscapes around them and, by extension, a change in their thinking.

Hidden histories can be buried within the ideals of home and homeland – another theme in my work. Ideally, home is a place of love and safety, and a homeland is a place with which a group of people identifies, often in a romanticized way. Maintaining these ideals can require the suppression of difficult histories.

I grew up as a child of immigrant parents, each from different homelands – but both forced to leave their homes, as teenagers, by 44

the circumstances of war. My family moved frequently as my father changed jobs, and my feeling of home was not defined by attachment to place. Home was wherever my parents happened to be. But when I found a stable teaching job in Western Massachusetts 42 years ago, I stayed. I had a double feeling - the wish to be grounded in a place but also apprehension about identifying too much with it.

Tensions around land and the idea of home are present in the Family Panoramas and the Homeland Scrolls, but the Occupying Massachusetts project is my most concrete attempt to think specifically about land, home and hidden histories as intertwined. In this project, I try both to connect deeply to the state in which I live and to ask, What are the difficult histories embedded in this place?

When we talk about histories, we also can’t help but think about the passage of time. Time – and mortality – are often on my mind. In the Present Moments portraits, I’m trying to use the simple juxtaposition of two moments to explore the dimensions of the human lifespan and pose questions about time such as: Is the passage of time really linear? Is it cyclical? What is transmitted – or not – from one generation to the next? What is new?

The process of combining two or more photos – which I used in Present Moments - is actually something I’ve been doing for a long time as a way of making meaning out of fragments. It’s an excruciatingly slow method but potentially deeply rewarding. The method is this: I gather images on an ongoing basis, responding with my camera to what interests me in the visual world and, in the process, building a large archive of photographic “pieces”. Then, when I am working on specific collages, I sift through hundreds of these pieces to search for the right image combinations, pairings that “strike a chord”. I make tentative combinations and then sit with them for a period of months to make sure that they have staying power – many do not. Working in this way, at the end of a year I 45

may have just 3 or 4 composite images that I deem successful.

Success to me means that the new image feels simultaneously singular and multiple, and the pieces of the image resonate deeply with each other.

While the portraits in Present Moments deal with individual human lifelines, the Occupying Massachusetts project expands the timeframe to centuries. Here the image captions identify Indigenous homelands from 400 years ago, connecting this knowledge to the present. The photographs are also intended to work in relation to each other, each contributing an element to the experience of “layers of history”. The full context of this project can best be experienced in the book, Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land, which was published in 2022.

A single photograph is sometimes thought of as a “slice of time”.

But a photograph never exists in a vacuum – it is a touchstone for many ideas, feelings and narratives far beyond the moment it represents. In addition to the themes of hidden histories, time and the concept of home, there are two final ideas I’d like to touch on.

First, although it’s complicated to speak about gender and photography, I do feel that the fact that I am a woman has been important to my work. It has informed the particular sense of family dynamics in my photos, and it has affected my career trajectory. I believe it’s not uncommon for women of my generation, and perhaps other generations too, to be late bloomers.

And secondly, questions of culture and photography have always been important to me. Culture can be thought of in a number of ways.

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Within my own image-making, I had to deal with cultural issues very specifically while working on the Occupying Massachusetts project. As a non-Indigenous photographer approaching the topic of the encounter between Indigenous people and English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1600s, I had to be careful. Although this devastating initial encounter took place before the invention of photography, by the 1840’s, Indigenous people also had become the subjects of many photos made and sold by white photographers.

So in this project I chose not to photograph people at all, focusing instead on my own impressions of the landscape, and on the public writing found on historical markers. I was very fortunate to be able to consult with 2 Indigenous advisors, one of whom wrote an essay for the book.

The newest work in the show is the Animal/Vegetable/Mineral project, and here I’m thinking about culture in relation to nature.

This theme – culture and nature -- can also be seen running through other projects in the show. Here I’m interested in the interrelationships between various components of the natural world, and also in how humans try to represent the complex physical workings of the mystery we call life. The project is ongoing and still might surprise us all.

In summary, I’ve tried to identify some of the issues that come up in my work – hidden histories, the passage of time, culture and nature, the ideas of home and homeland. While I always have specific ideas in mind when I am working, things can look different in retrospect. My image-making over the years has felt, in many ways, very personal and private, and the Unearthing exhibition has offered me a welcome opportunity to think about it in conversation with a range of ideas. My heartfelt thanks to Jessica Roscio, S. Billie Mandle and Laura Wexler, and to the Danforth Museum, which has historically been so supportive of women artists.

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The State We’re In Laura Wexler I’d like to share the experience of making my way through Sandra Matthews’ book Occupying Massachusetts, a selection of which is on the wall so beautifully in this exhibition. I did not find it an easy book to understand. Sandra brought me a copy when she had just published it and I sat with it, looked through the photographs and thought , “Well, this is nice, this is interesting, these are beautiful.” But I didn’t know how to get into the book until I read its accompanying texts: Sandra’s introduction and the accompanying two essays.

Let me quote a little bit of Sandra’s introduction: “The 7 year process of making Occupying Massachusetts has profoundly changed how I see my surroundings. Strangely, exploring the complex and painful histories of the state in which I live, as well as the ways in which past events have been suppressed or spun, has connected me more deeply to my environment. I can feel the layers of time and the presence of people who lived here centuries ago, and I continue to learn from those who are here today.”

I want to point out the word “layers” because that is really one of the key words of this project and this work. But I also want to take my privilege as a former English and comparative literature professor to emphasize two phrases – she wants to explore “the complex and painful histories of the state in which I live” and also the title of the book “Occupying Massachusetts.”

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Presumably those phrases refer to the state of Massachusetts and the settler colonial occupation of Massachusetts. Or more broadly, perhaps more abstractly, they also pertain to the notion of settling, of home, of making a home, occupying, living in. But I want to add a third meaning to these phrases. I think the book is also about the “state” in which Sandra is living and we’re all living, the state we’re in. We’re in a state – not Massachusetts, but a state of being, that is profoundly disruptive and an enormous turning point in the world, and in our lives. We are in a state, and that state is occupying us.

We are thinking about it, I am thinking about it and I’m not really knowing how to deal with the state I’m in. And I’m occupied by that.

And I believe that Sandra’s work is on this project has been much longer than seven years. I think Sandra has been working on this project at least as long as I have known her - since the mid 1980s.

And I think that another question behind the title of this work is: what occupations should people in Massachusetts - or the state we’re in - be involved with? How should we address the situation that we’re living in in the world? What is occupying us and what should be occupying us? Is there redress from what has occupied us, offering us a different kind of future?

Partly, I’m helped in hearing these meanings in the words because of the two essays that appear in the book. One is by Native American activist David Brule, who has convened meetings between Indigenous people from the region and local historians, some descended from colonists, who come together around a table once a month and talk about the state we’re in. They have very difficult conversations but also promising ones, bridging the gaps between us. The other essay,

by Suzanne Gardinier, draws parallels between the massacres of Indigenous peoples and the massacres of villagers in the Vietnam War 49

and, presciently, in Gaza. The state we’re in is painful and needs to be explored, and I found that making my way through the images and words in Sandra’s book has helped me to explore it.

“Layers”, as I said, is a key word here. Layers are present in the content of the book and present in the form of the photographs.

But there is another thing that’s going on which is the pairing of images, the accompanying of one image by another. There is very seldom an image that isn’t paired with another image. The questions that arise in one image have a response in the other image, and vice versa. These pairs are deliberate. We can ask questions and they don’t go unanswered. They may not be fully answered but they are spoken to in the pair.

I think of these accompaniments actually as a friendship between the images. They assert that there are other people at the table, there are other frames among us, there were other people here before us, and Sandra has created the opportunity for many to participate in questions and answers. The pairs represent an accompaniment, which also helps us to think about the state we’re in. Just as Sandra and I have shared an extraordinary friendship and accompaniment for over 40 years, her book is offering everyone that accompaniment, formed in the images and texts and also available to you.

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Undoing Photography S. Billie Mandle

In my own work I think about questions of photography, time, and place, and so I will speak about these ideas in relationship to Sandra Matthews’ project, Present Moments.

I’ve been teaching Present Moments to students probably almost every semester since I first started teaching at Hampshire in 2012. For the first few years, when I lectured on the work, I approached it in the way that I would any other body of work by a contemporary artist. I analyzed the pictures, breaking down the techniques and the ideas, discussing their relationship to historical and contemporary photographers. I put Sandra’s work in context with artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Emmet Gowin, Rineke Dijkstra, and Dawoud Bey. Then, in 2016, my son was born. That next year when I was putting together my lecture on Sandra’s work, I couldn’t talk about “Present Moments” in the same way. I felt completely undone by the pictures – by the way the images make visceral the passage of time.

Why do we want to hold on to time? To stop it so much? This is of course one of the appeals of photography – that it offers the fiction of stopping and holding time – of giving this flow in which we are so mercilessly caught – a chance to pause. Photography creates the fiction that time is something we can capture, reproduce, and hold.

The title of the work, Present Moments, acknowledges that the present is not singular but moments spliced together. A singularity made up of multiples. We see individuals at different points in their lives, 51

sometimes separated by only a few years, sometimes by 20. It is significant that the subjects of these photographs are put together in the same frame – not separated. In photography we talk about time, and the world, as discrete parcels, frames, rectangles to be separated.

We often talk of the syntax that happens between images, treating each moment as a word with its own meaning. Sandra creates her own language. She is not bound by the rectangles of time that the camera captures. By putting multiple moments into the same context, she acknowledges the arbitrary nature of the language of images and of time.

Contemporary physics does not think of time as linear or even as discrete parcels. In fact, our understanding of time is probably an illusion. (I am completely unqualified to speak about contemporary physics so please be patient with this digression.) Sandra’s pictures are prescient – they embrace the simultaneity of moments, the impossibility of before and after, that contemporary physics also describes. Sandra untangles photography from a linear idea of time. And from a linear idea of self. A single person is shown to be expansive – in her pictures individuals extend, past and future selves flow into one another.

The newspapers that make up the background in many of Sandra’s images are also a way of playing with time. For me, the newspapers signify the constant stream of news, events, and information that have come to define each day – the way our society measures time and progress. This unfolding of events is the background but not the foreground for the lives Sandra photographs.

Walter Benjamin, his essay the “Storyteller” writes: “every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in 52

noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information…. It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation.”

If this was true for Benjamin in 1936, it is even more true today – when everything we read or see seems to be informed by statistics and determined by algorithms. Information determines how we understand the world – and how we are supposed to understand ourselves.

Sandra’s images work against information – she is a storyteller. The images don’t explain or spell out how to be read– instead we are given the outline of a narrative and no plot. Take the image titled, “Sam, Lily and Emma in 2010 / Sam and Emma in 2018.” Eight years is not much time – but during eight years these children have ‘grown up’ – and all the nebulous phrase implies. They assume new armor and postures of maturity, they have absorbed much, they look at the world in a new way. And yet we don’t know anything about those 8 years – what is it exactly that moved and shaped them. We don’t even know what happened to Lily.

In Sandra’s work it is as if we are given the beginning of the story and an end – but we never learn what happened in the middle.

Instead of knowing answers, we feel the questions. There is no reducing life to information. The viewer is left to interpret the images – to appreciate what is unknown. It is the unnamable mysteries of the eight years that move us.

One of the reasons I love Sandra’s work is because, in a way, she undoes photography. She makes us rethink our assumptions about the medium.

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Photography is meant to be a static moment of time – a decisive moment. But here she shows us that that is impossible – that photography is never just one moment, one person, or one place.

Photography is supposed to be objective, to convey a truth– but when we look at the subjects in her pictures, we realize we can’t stand back far enough to gain an objective perspective. The truth is not where we can see it. It is hidden out of sight. What we can see is the product of what was -- you can’t tell the whole story with a photograph.

Present Moments both acknowledge and denies the questions we ask – our typical search for explanation, information, and interpretation.

As we view the pictures these answers seem less and less important – and less adequate to the immensity of the stories being depicted.

Instead, we take refuge in the empty spaces. The viewer is invited into the pictures and given the space to internalize and reckon with what is and is not there. It is in this space that we feel the stories rather than learn about them. I find this to be the most poignant aspect of Sandra’s work – and also the most hopeful.

I’m going to end with what might seem to be a random quote by D.W. Winnicott –it is about the space between mothers and children.

“The interplay of mother and baby [creates] an area that could be called common ground … the place where the Secret is, the potential space… the symbol of trust and of union… a union which involves no interpretation. [A space] for playing, where affection, and enjoyment in experience are born.”

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I think this describes the space of Sandra’s pictures.

To be frank, Sandra’s pictures aren’t gentle like Winnicott’s description of a mother and child. Quite the opposite. Her pictures ask us to look closely at mortality and loss. But she does so in a way that acknowledges their role in the play of life – she allows secrets to exist without interpretation – she creates images of affection – and this gives us the chance to create our own experiences. Most importantly – she creates space where we can share our experiences – an intimacy – with one another.

Sandra Matthews is Associate Professor Emerita at Hampshire College and author of Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land (2022) and Present Moments (2020). She is also co-author (with Laura Wexler) of Pregnant Pictures (2000). https://www.sandramatthewsprojects.com/ S. Billie Mandle is Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and author of Reconciliation (2020) and Circumference (2024). www.billiemandle.com Laura Wexler is Charles H. Farnam Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University; Co-Chair of the Public Humanities Program; and Director of the Photographic Memory Workshop. She is author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism (2000) and co-author of Pregnant Pictures (2020) and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024).

Special thanks to Stan Sherer for making final prints of all images in the exhibition except the Family Panoramas.

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