This winter and spring, my department is hosting a wonderful intern, and one of the other managers and I have been co-mentoring her. We’ve based our curriculum for her time with us on the life of an image - the core functionality of our department - photography creation, image editing, metadata creation, and image management. In addition to getting hands-on experience in these different aspects of our daily work, we’ve also arranged a few field trips. The first was a behind-the-scenes look at the museum’s Thorne Miniature Rooms, since our intern is working to digitize archival material from that collection (amazing drawings of some of the furniture!).
One of the Thorne Miniature Rooms
Our second trip took us to the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) just down the road from us. My fellow co-mentor worked at MoCP while she was in college, so she clued me into the fantastic offerings they have for scheduling a visit. In addition to viewing the rotating exhibits on display, visitors can request exhibition tours and print viewings. For the print viewings, which is the option we went with for our field trip, the curators have pulled together groups of prints around different themes. We selected two of these print collections: alternative processes and techniques, and picturing Chicago. When the staff who facilitated our discussion heard that we were coming from the Art Institute of Chicago, they ended up pulling additional selections - which was so wonderful!
The majority of our department ended up tagging along on our field trip, as did an intern and fellow from the Photography department and a staff member from the Publishing department at the museum. We began our visit by spending some time in the exhibit on display, In Real Life, which was thought-provoking:
“As the powerful technology behind artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, machines have developed the capacity to not only capture images but to “see” them as well. In Real Life is an exhibition seeking to examine the real-world impact of computer vision—from the murky ethics of data collection and surveillance to the racial and gender biases that abound in facial recognition technology.
Through the lens of seven artists working with a range of digital media, In Real Life presents works that grapple with the fraught relationship between humans and technology, with an emphasis on the social and aesthetic ramifications of machine “seeing.” With a charged underpinning of human biases, these pieces, many of which were generated through algorithmic technology, present a speculative near-future wherein the socio-political consequences of AI have already begun to compromise how we visualize the world—and our humanity.”
Installation of works from In Real Life
We then gathered in the instructional space upstairs with a couple of MoCP staff and the prints. They invited us to take a closer look, and we then dove into conversations about each of the prints - the materiality and process, the concept, the history, and more. Given the range of types of photography, from straight documentary to highly conceptual, there was a lot of great discussion around each of the works. It felt like being back in art school in some ways, and I really enjoyed our time spent together viewing and talking about the prints.
We wrapped up our trip with a tour of some of their collection storage space, a lucky bonus since we were coming from another museum! The staff were gracious enough to tour us around and talk about some of the other prints that are in the museum’s collection. Our intern let us know that she enjoyed this part of the field trip in particular, and as someone who nerds out about collection storage space, my heart grew after hearing this.
Some of my favorite spaces in libraries, archives, and museums are where all of the materials are stored
I can’t believe this was my first trip to MoCP, after living in Chicago for 10 years. It certainly won’t be my last visit, though! A huge thanks to all the staff there, and to my co-mentor, for making this visit possible.