Brett Abbott

Brett Abbott is Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia

interview & photography by Mike Rippy | november 9, 2015

I’d like to find out how your career developed. Where you were before the High, and so on. Should we go way back?

You can go as far back as you want. So, if in high school you had some kind of epiphany about photography… Well, I guess I did have little epiphanies in high school, or maybe even before high school. So, my dad’s a doctor, he’s a pediatrician, but he was an amateur photographer and he had a dark room in the garage which I still remember. As a child, it was kind of like a forbidden zone because it had chemicals and bad stuff for kids. But I still remember that, and so I guess, him taking pictures of family, printing them and having them out on the walls had an impression on me. In high school I was the photography editor of the school’s literary magazine. I thought then that maybe I wanted to be a photographer. I shadowed a photographer who basically told me not to become a photographer, actually, but it was still an interesting experience.

I started making pictures, not printing. I didn’t use a dark room or anything like that, but I started making pictures as a kind of enthusiast and entered a competition. I don’t remember the exact details about the competition, it might have even been in association with that literary magazine, but I won that competition. And, as a result of that, some of the pictures went on display in a shop window down in Santa Barbara where I grew up. And so they were out on view, and one of them was a picture of the I.M. Pei building in Boston, that really tall glass skyscraper structure. It was sort of looking up the building at the clouds, as I recall. It ended up catching the attention of someone who wanted to purchase it. This guy asked the store owner if he could purchase the photograph, and the store owner said, “Well, these are on view from a competition, they’re students’, I don’t think I can give out the contact information, but let me relay a message.” They contacted me, and so I ended up selling a photograph in high school, which was an interesting, exhilarating experience for a young photography enthusiast.

Those were probably the very early influences. And then at the same time, I had taken an art history class in high school, which was quite unusual because it was a public high school, so it was not a place where art history was typically taught. In fact, it hadn’t been taught for fifteen years. There was this one teacher who was passionate about teaching art history, but it had been cut many years before because of budgets, and because it was seen as something that wasn’t critical to education. When I was going into my junior year, though, that teacher received the go-ahead to start this class up again for the first time in a decade or more, and so I signed up for it thinking it sounded interesting. That was probably the most important part of the launching pad for how I got to where I am today, because I really loved that class. It was the hardest class that I took in high school. It was harder than most of the classes that I took in college, and she was intensely passionate about the subject matter. We started back in cave painting time and followed the history of art all the way to the present.

I think we ran out of time and that we didn’t actually get to photography, or very much in the way of modern and contemporary art, but I was hooked, I just loved it.

When I got to college, in my freshman year dorm, the R.A. who lived across from me was an art history major, and I was not thinking that I would be an art historian. I thought maybe I would do international relations or something in the business world. But she said, “Well if you took art history in high school and liked it, there is this great teacher who does Greek and Roman art here, and if you have an elective you should take it. You’re going to love it.” So I took one, and that was the end of it. I started taking more and more art history courses, and pretty soon I realized that this was what really did it for me, what made me excited, what I should make my life out of. And so I decided to major in art history, and I ended up going and studying abroad. I studied in Spain and Italy my junior year of college and those were important experiences for me, being surrounded by historical art. I was in Seville and Florence, and both places are kind of like living museums in a way.

I came back and I started to become, my senior year, more interested in photography again, and in modern art. I graduated a little bit early, but there was a history of photography class being taught, I think, after I graduated. I was making money by projecting slides for art history classes and other miscellaneous things, and so I chose to project the slides for the history of photography class so that I could essentially sit in and listen to the curriculum. That was probably the first time that I had had a formal, or even semi-formal, background in the history of photography, even though I’d had an interest in it from a younger age.

I had also interned the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. I had a dual role: half of my role was that I was an unpaid intern and I helped out the development department, and the other half was selling tickets at the front desk, which I actually got paid for.

That summer they had a show called “The Vernon Collection,” which was a collection of photography from a very well known set of collectors. They were a couple who lived in Los Angeles and had created this really incredible collection of historical photography,

and they came up to include some contemporary photography, like Edward Weston and some really incredible work. So that show was pretty influential on me as well, from a photography perspective.

Once I had declared my art history major in college I realized that if I wanted to work in what my major was, I probably had to get an advanced degree of some sort. To work at most museums, to teach at the college level, I needed at least a masters or a PhD.

So, I started looking for graduate programs and I decided I would go straight from undergraduate into graduate school. I applied to Williams College, which has a very well known masters program in art history, and I got a fellowship and went there. At Williams, I took courses with the current Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. His name is Jim Ganz, and I took a history of photography course with him that focused mostly on nineteenth century photography. He was the first professor to take me and my class to New York, and we actually got to see and experience the photography market for the first time. He took us to some dealers, private collectors, things like that, and I really got a sense for the other side, the non-academia side of museums and museum work. That was a really a powerful experience for me.

Between my two years at Williams, I received an internship at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. to work in the Photography Department. This was a very important experience for me. I worked with Sarah Greenough, who was, and still is, the curator there. I was mostly tasked with doing research for her Alfred Stieglitz collection book. It’s a big, dual-volume book on the Stieglitz collection at the National Gallery. That internship really solidified my experience and direction in photography in a professional sense, in a way that hadn’t happened before. It is probably the reason that I’m here today.

My masters thesis, believe it or not, was actually on a Renaissance topic. I researched chapel painting in Florence, specifically fresco painting by Ghirlandaio on the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita. But, a lot of my coursework and practical work had been in photography.

When I graduated I was looking for jobs and sent out resumes everywhere. One of the calls that I received back was from the Getty Museum, from Judy Keller, who was then the Associate Curator of Photography at the Getty. She had received my application for Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Getty. I eventually flew out and had an interview there with Weston Neff, who was the curator at the time and in charge of the department. I was hired, I think in 2002, to be a Curatorial Assistant in that department, and that was another incredible opportunity for me. It was an entry-level curatorial role, but I had access to this vault that had a hundred thousand works from across the history of photography in it. I very quickly was able to take on a number of opportunities there in the exhibitions and publications realm that were probably advanced for my role. I did a Brett Weston show as part of a recent acquisitions exhibition, and I wrote a little book on Edward Weston as a father and son, and those are some of my earliest projects there. But I was able to really sink my teeth into a number of really good meaty projects, exhibitions, and publications, and to sort of ascend through the ranks of the curatorial department there from Curatorial Assistant to Assistant Curator to Associate Curator. At a certain point, I was involved in the senior staff meetings of the department. It’s a big department, the size of some museums, and that was just an incredible experience and opportunity to have.

When I started there, I anticipated going back for a Ph.D., but I think the Getty in some ways became my Ph.D., maybe better. I got to do real practical books and exhibitions, and really get a sense for how a museum works. I had access to learn from six other curators, all studying different parts of the history of photography, and having access to all of these photographs I learned connoisseurship, which is something that’s very difficult to learn without having a collection like that at your fingertips. I did the Edward Weston book and then did a major Edward Weston show, and in the process of doing that, you just handle so many Weston prints that you know what is the real deal and what isn’t. You can look at a friend and say “oh, that’s from a 1928 negative, but this print was probably made in the 1930s, and I can tell that by the mounting paper and the gelatin silver…” And so you just kind of learn how this materials changed over the years, and before you know it you just have this intuitive sense of the material history of photography in a way that is very difficult to obtain outside of that kind of environment.

So all of those things were really critical, I think, to me getting where I am today. Judy Keller was a really incredible mentor for me at the Getty. She always gave me projects to work on that would develop me as an individual and as a professional, and mentored me in ways that allowed me to grow into the curator that I am today. I’m really indebted to her, and I feel that that’s a really important thing for me to do for others now. I feel very strongly about internships, mentorship, and training the next generation.

So, how long have you been here at the High Museum? Almost 5 years. I was offered the position in 2010, and I think by the time I got here it was 2011. The strengths of the collection here are really American 20th century photography, and that’s what I became a specialist in at the Getty. I had done work there on modernist photography in America like Edward Weston. The other specialty that I developed there was documentary work and photojournalism, and, in particular, socially engaged photography. I did a big project on what was called “engaged observers, documentary photographers since the sixties,” in which I looked at that tradition of socially engaged work and how it had come out of artists such as Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. I focused on how it transformed in the second half of the 20th century to fuse art and documentary in a way that was very new, fresh, and powerful for the printed page. So, those were two of my specialties, and I think that’s actually why I was a really good fit for the High Museum.

The strengths here are American 20th century photography, as I said, with sort of an emphasis on modernist traditions, especially in the postwar period. We also have an emphasis in the documentary tradition, as we have the largest collection of vintage civil rights prints of any museum in the country. So, those two facets of my background and my interests were a really good match for the collection here at the High.

If I were to expand upon that even more… I usually talk about the collection as having three pillars and a base. By that, I mean that I talk about that “art for art’s sake,” and that modernist tradition where we have great strength. I’m thinking of things like Harry Callahan. We have one of the great institutional collections of his work, and so that’s one pillar. Another pillar is the documentary tradition, and I mentioned that great civil rights collection that we have, so that’s the documentary, socially engaged pillar. We also have contemporary work, which tends to have a slightly more international inflection to it than the other two pillars, which are primarily American. The contemporary holdings tend to broaden the definition of American. We have works by Sugimoto or Vik Muniz, photographers who were born elsewhere but are working in the United States and in their home countries, and who are having more of an international dialogue in their work. Then, across those three pillars, I think of southern photography as being a kind of base. We like to give emphasis to work that is made in and about the South, and I think that as the great museum of the South, we should have the best collections of the great southern photographers, so that’s one of the initiatives that I’ve been working on.

Could you talk a little more about the photograph as an object, and maybe lead into the idea of connoisseurship? A lot of times when I do portfolio reviews, or I’m talking with young photographers, the conversation starts out as being about images and concepts, and about what holds the body of work together from more of a conceptual perspective, what gives it integrity as something that has thinking behind it. But, I almost always try to steer the conversation at the end of those sessions towards other questions, like the following: What do you envision this thing to look like? When it’s on the wall, what do you expect it to look like? And so on. Because I think that’s such an important leap to make, to be able to go from image to object, and easily half the art of photography is how an image or concept translates into a thing that is worthy of being seen as a physical manifestation in the gallery, and preserved into the future for hundreds of years by a museum. “What is the visceral and physical impact of that object on the people that look at it?” That’s a very different question from, say, “how does this image impact me in an intellectual way?” And it’s when you bring those two things together that photography becomes really powerful. So, I always try to steer the conversation there, and it’s something that I think not everyone is prepared to think about because we live in an image saturated world now. We see images all over the place, and we see them in different sizes. You see them on your phone, on your iPad, on your desktop screen, on digital billboards and posters; they’re just everywhere. It seems to be true that size doesn’t really actually communicate that much. So, it’s really important when you’re thinking about photography in the context of the museum, and to think about that physicality. You can see an image like this one by Harry Callahan of his wife. It’s just this incredibly beautiful, delicate, yet powerful work, and it’s all of, you know, 3 x 4″ or something. It has a very different physical, emotional, and visceral effect when you see it in a gallery than, for example, that work right there by Abelardo Morell, which is 4 x 6′, and is mounted on die bond. It has a very different physical interaction with you as a viewer. They’re both equally valid, but they’re different, and as a photographer, it’s important to think about “how does my image translate into an object,” and then, “how does that object affect the people that will be looking at it, and what do I want that relationship to be?”

And that’s really the heart and the beginning of connoisseurship, in a way, because connoisseurship is just recognition of those aesthetic choices by photographers of the past. If I had more Westons out, I could make my point even better, but we have two pretty extraordinary ones right here. Here’s Weston experimenting with developing his early language of modernist photography and focusing on a palm tree in Mexico, isolating that trunk of the tree as though it’s a smokestack, just that one single cylindrical form across the composition framed against the sky. He’s printed it in a platinum palladium medium. A few years later, by 1928, he starts making images of shells in his dark room. He sets up the shells against, in a very crude setting, just a wooden room in his home in Carmel, California. He placed a piece of cardboard behind the shells, and, lighting it just ever so slightly, set up his 8 x 10″ view camera on the subject. He would open up the lens for six hours, eight hours, and let that lighting just, very gently, illuminate this set of shells and expose the negative over this period of time, in which they become these really beautiful, even luminescent, shapes against a deep, rich background. The cardboard backing has totally disappeared and has become this really luscious, elegant black. He decided to print that with a matte gelatin silver paper because moving away from the warm tones of the platinum palladium of the palm tree, and towards something that still has warmth to it, but is more black and white in its approach, while still matte texture like the platinum palladium of the palm. If I had a third picture here, a shell that he did, or even the same shell but printed two years later, it would be a glossy gelatin silver, and that is what he would use for the rest of his career, that glossy gelatin silver. But understanding that evolution of his material aesthetic is really interesting, and it’s a part of understanding and being able to identify these as early prints, first of all, because you have this printed later as a gelatin silver. But I know this because I have that connoisseurship background. I know that this is one of the earliest prints that he made from this negative because a year later he wouldn’t be using this paper anymore.

How do you look at that amount of photography and maintain an edge? Well, you don’t always think about the connoisseurship. Sometimes, you’re thinking about the other things that the artists were thinking about, or that a curator would think about, such as the value, condition, how its fits together within a series, or how it fits on a wall. So you’re thinking about different things when you look at works of art. You’re not always thinking about the connoisseurship of objects. In many ways, the connoisseurship comes out of experience. It almost comes through just working with the objects. Some of it you have to think about and commit to memory, but other parts of it almost become intuitive because you’ve handled the things so much. A good example of that is when I see a work and I think, “I don’t know why this doesn’t look right to me, but something about it doesn’t feel right.” Something just doesn’t feel right about it, and I won’t be able to tell you exactly right then and there why, but something about it doesn’t work with that body of knowledge and experience that exists in my head. And then, if I sit back and I think about it for awhile, or do a little bit of research, I’m able to realize, “Oh, it’s because X and Y, or it’s because the vintage prints were printed on this paper and that’s not that paper and that’s why it struck me as being odd… it doesn’t mean that it’s counterfeit, or etc.” A lot of it is just through experience. You build up this familiarity with methods and materials, and they become something that you just understand. You know the palm of your hand, but you might not be able to describe every nook and cranny of it. It’s kind of the same thing.

In connecting this back to the photographer as artist, do you feel that this process of creating and refining allows a photographer to achieve a collectable body of work? I think it depends on the collection and it depends on the institution. Earlier, we started talking about the word “relevance,” and the idea that that word is so important. A lot of people don’t think about that as being a driving principle behind what museums think about when they’re making these kinds of acquisition decisions, but, from an artist’s perspective, they’re thinking about what’s great and interesting about their work. But it is really important for them to think about, if they’re approaching a museum, what the museum is interested in and how what they’re doing intersects with what the museum is doing. So, there are some institutions that are very interested in supporting emerging photographers. They are interested in investing and supporting those kinds of artists who are maybe not as tested, and in finding something really interesting about what they’re doing, in helping them take their work to yet another level of excellence.

Other museums take the opposite approach, and their interest is not to get involved in the messiness of the present, but to wait and let time sift through these things. They essentially let those other institutions find the hidden gems, and then through that process will help to acquire work that has proven itself through the test of time and through the market and all those things. So, it really depends on what kind of an institution you’re looking at, and what specifically that institution’s interest is. How are they building their collection? Why are some things important to them and other things less so? There’s a lot going on in photography right now. There always has been, but right now there’s an explosion of artists working. So how do you make sense of that and how do you pull things out of that that are relevant to you? This is where relevance becomes the key to which you edit all of those possibilities. And so when I was talking about our collection, and when I’m thinking about building our collection, I’m thinking about those areas of strength.

We have a good collection. It’s about six thousand works, and it represents many facets of the history of photography from the beginnings to now. It includes representation of many parts of the world, but its focus is really American 20th century photography, with some contemporary work and also that southern base. So when I’m thinking about about collecting work and building that collection, I’m usually thinking that I don’t want this collection to be mediocre at everything. I’d rather it be really good at certain things, and so I tend to add to existing strengths. A good example would be that we have a great Callahan collection. I had an opportunity to do a project on Wynn Bullock here at the High, and we had an opportunity to do a major project on a photographer who was really important in his day, but had kind of fallen off the radar. We had this opportunity to have a real impact on resurrecting someone’s career that was really notable, but that people have lost track of over the years. And I had an opportunity, at the same time, to build the collection through a major acquisition, and to become one of the major repositories for his career. He happened to be a colleague of Callahan, where we also had great strength, as I said. You can see how that kind of opportunity gave me the ability to do something really important on a scholarship and visibility level, the ability to do something that advances the collection in a really significant and international way, and the ability to build on a strength that is already existing, thus making the High even stronger in that period in American photography. It seemed like a relevant choice that made sense for us. In a similar way, we think about building the southern collection, and Harry Callahan, although he was not only a southern photographer, had lived in Atlanta for the last part of his life. He really lived just across the street, so we think of him not only as a mid-century modernist, but also as a strength in southern photography. So, when I was looking at doing some major acquisitions recently, we focused on the work of Clarence John Laughlin, who happened to be a colleague of Bullock and Callahan, and who also happened to be one of the great Southern photographers of his generation, really of the 20th century. So again, it’s one of those situations where all of the relevance is checked to our strengths, interests, and direction as a collection. Doing a major acquisition of the Laughlin work made a lot of sense for us. So now, because of that acquisition, we have one of the great Laughlin collections in the United States. A similar thing happened with William Christenberry, another major southern photographer and early practitioner of color work. We grew that collection into one of the leading Christenberry holdings in the nation as well. So, you can see that those are some of the ways that I think. When I’m presented with 100 opportunities to acquire something, I’m thinking about that word “relevance” and how it can advance the museum as a center with particular strengths.

When has that ever not worked? When, if ever, has your approach to how you’re going to collect something been overridden by the desire to have a particular photograph? I’m a pretty disciplined person to be honest with you. I break my rules sometimes with gifts. Although we’re known as a major collector of 20th century American photography, we happen to have a really interesting pocket of photographs by the French photographer Atget. It’s actually maybe our deepest monographic collection. We have 350 Atget prints, and most of those were acquired as gifts. Am I going to say no to gifts of Atget work because they’re not southern and midcentury American? No, I’m not going to. I’m going to say yes to those, and I’m going to think about the ways in which Atget influenced Evans, Berenice Abbott, Peter Sekaer, Christenberry, and Lauhglin. I’ll try to draw parallels between our strengths in those areas and this figure, who did have an impact on the course of American photography. So, I guess I’m justifying relevance even in the case of someone who would seem to fall outside of those bounds. I have been tempted… there are certain Japanese photographers that I just love, and I’ve been tempted to create rationales to acquire them. I haven’t quite gone that route yet, but I can see maybe in the future doing something like that. I usually try and base those decisions, particularly if you’re spending money, around making the most of that investment and how it can be meaningful to the museum. I try to be pretty strict about acquisitions because if you open up that door you can just go anywhere.