Your Story Has Touched My Heart

For the last year, metaLAB artist-in-residence Sarah Newman and I have been exploring the American Professional Photographers Collection, a remarkable—and largely hidden—collection of images in the Harvard Art Museums. The collection contains the work of journeyman and master photographers, artisans who worked in their communities to document the hopes and fears of their neighbors and clients. Encompassing weddings and house fires, grand openings and crime scenes, funerals and parades, this body of work reflects nearly a century of American prosperity, turmoil, and transformation. And throughout, the collection has surprised us with its strangeness, its intimacy, and its poignancy.

With some twenty thousand images, the collection defies encompassing in a single gesture; in its archival richness, its documentary idiosyncrasy and depth, it resists categorization. We see strange hints of wonder and worry, of great joy and abjection, of collective struggle and piercing individuality.

With generous help from the Harvard Art Museums, and the support and ingenuity of our metaLAB colleagues, we’ve been making a multimedia piece to express our own response to the material. Entitled Your Story Has Touched My Heart, the resulting video and computational installation will be exhibited in the Museums’ Lightbox Gallery from May 23 to June 6.

In an event on May 25th at 3 pm, we’ll screen the work in the Museums’ Menschel Lecture Hall, and discuss the collection with art historian Kate Palmer Albers and Bobbie Norfleet, the sociologist, photographer, and former professor who developed the collection for Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. We’re excited to show Your Story Has Touched My Heart to friends, colleagues, and museum visitors, and to share the richness and wonder of this amazing collection. Full details on the project, the opening event, and a series of associated gallery talks, are available here.