Image: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
On September 30, Harvard Art Museums will present an opening program for ‘The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection.’ The program will be a roundtable about Barbara Norfleet’s influence on photography at Harvard as a teacher, curator, and artist. The participants are Kiku Adatto, Peter Galassi, Lauren Greenfield, Susan Meiselas, and Audrey Sands.
The event is a lecture from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, and is listed as in person.
‘The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection’ brings renewed attention to a vast archive of photographs assembled in the 1970s by sociologist and curator Barbara P. Norfleet. The exhibition is on view from August 29, 2026, through May 9, 2027.
Samuel Cooper’s ‘Untitled (bridal portrait, Brookline, Massachusetts)’ was made in 1946 and printed later; it is a gelatin silver print. Elsa Dorfman’s ‘Barbara Norfleet’ is a 20 × 24 Polaroid print dated February 24, 1997. The two works carry titles that identify, respectively, a bridal portrait in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Barbara Norfleet herself.
This event is part of ‘In Conversation,’ a series of evening programs that feature local and international curators, artists, scholars, and more.
