![]() ![]() "Will enlighten the student and refresh the informed. Contributes greatly to the literature and will occupy a favorite spot on the book shelves.(Former) Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art By Kay Kenny Katherine Ware is the Curator of Photographs in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ![]() She traveled to the East Coast in 1999, leaving her position as the Assistant Curator at the J. While at the Getty, she organized “A Practical Dreamer: The Photographs of Man Ray,” 1998–1999 and “Vision in Motion: The Photographs of László Moholy-Nagy,” 1995. Known for her expertise in early 20 th-century photography, she is rapidly expanding that knowledge as a frequent juror and reviewer of contemporary photography exhibits, including the first Fotofest in China in 2006. Your master’s degree in art history is from Berkeley, and your previous museum experience before coming to Philadelphia was all on the West Coast. I grew up outside Dayton, Ohio, where my parents still live. My first job out of college was in D.C., at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), where I was able to get involved in a variety of projects. That experience before graduate school cemented my desire to work in a museum and also to concentrate on photography. Working next door to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was a thrill for me, and I saw a lot of art during my three years in Washington. Sarah Greenough did an important Stieglitz show at the National Gallery that I saw, and I remember a show of Laura Gilpin’s stunning platinum prints at the National Museum of Natural History. I visited the Corcoran Gallery of Art regularly, and I bought my first photograph in D.C., a print by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen from the Jones-Troyer Gallery. When I was working at SITES, I met a graduate intern named Deborah Klochko (now the director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego) who was very influential in stimulating my pursuit of photo history. Was your ambition always to be a curator? You once told an interviewer that as a child you used to play “museum” arranging your collections in a neighbor’s garage and charging admission. I’m not sure I knew about curators, so my model was perhaps more that of a park ranger. There was a wonderful naturalist named Paul Knoop at Aullwood Audubon Center, near where I grew up. He knew all about plants and animals and was passionate about cultivating a love of nature in others. I wanted to be like that, to learn about and care for things in the world around me and to share my enthusiasm and knowledge. It’s a slightly different kind of stewardship that I do, but both are grounded in respect, study, love and connoisseurship. And both are vital to the well being of the human beast. Identifying a bird hidden in a tree by its call and recognizing an artist’s style in a work of art are the same kind of pleasure to me. You left the Getty Museum where you were an Assistant Curator in Photography to become Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum in 1999. ![]()
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