Rebecca A. Senf

I began my career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where I co-curated a major exhibition of the work of Ansel Adams, drawn from the Lane Collection –at the time the largest collection of his work in private hands. The opportunity to dive deep into the research and really get to know each of the prints in the collection was a pleasure. Prior to this, I was assigned to catalogue the museum’s photography collection, a task that led me to be trained in medium identification by Kim Nichols, a conservator in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs department. That opportunity to examine and understand the materiality of the medium gave me a deep appreciation for and curiosity about photographs as objects. I went on to do a doctoral dissertation about Ansel Adams’s early work, studying his prints in many public and private collections and getting to know him through the copious correspondence of his housed in the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). Now, as Chief Curator at CCP, it’s wonderful to be able to produce exhibitions from that archive that share with audiences the complexity, humor, sincerity, and enthusiasm of Adams that I have been fortunate to come to know first-hand. As curator at the CCP, I work with an amazing collection of over 100,000 photographs, from which a wide range of exhibitions have been possible. I create monographic exhibitions, such as of Edward Weston (his Mexico work), Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, and W. Eugene Smith (his LIFE magazine photo essays) and I collaborate with contemporary photographers to exhibit their work. I design thematic shows, including about Group f/64 and California pictorialism, time as captured by the medium of photography, pictures of Arizona, aerial photography (of which the Center has an amazingly strong collection), one-of-a-kind photographic objects, and most recently, LIGHT Gallery. It’s fun to think about how to use pictures to engage people to think about photography, to see the prints in new ways, and to reflect on their own experiences. My strong interest in photographic books was cemented with the gift of a first edition of Roy DeCarava’s Sweet Flypaper of Life when I was in graduate school. I curated an exhibition drawing on the Center’s archives called Process and the Page about how photographers made books, sharing maquettes, journals, and correspondence that revealed the nitty gritty of the process. I produced two juried exhibitions of self-published books, in which the audience members were invited to touch and explore the selections in their own process of discovery. I have so enjoyed my own experience as a juror, reviewing hundreds of books, and thinking about what qualities distinguish the most exceptional publications. Each year such beautiful, inspiring, moving, and provocative books are made. With so many archives at the Center for Creative Photography, and such a vast collection of prints, the potential for future exhibitions is limitless. The process of learning from the collection and then sharing the story that emerges is among the great pleasures of being a curator.