tant exhibitions devoted exclusively to photography.
In his first year as Director of the Department he
curated Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s show Strangers
(1993) an exhibition that defamiliarized the types
of photography that Szarkowski had brought into
the Museum, opening or re-opening them for enjoy-
ment and analysis. In the catalogue that accompa-
nied the exhibition Galassi quotes with approval
diCorcia’s observation that ‘‘photography is a for-
eign language that everyone thinks they speak.’’ The
last major show before the Museum again closed
down—for its second set of major renovations and
expansions in 20 years—was the first, and eagerly
awaited, show of Andreas Gursky in the United
States (Andreas Gursky (2001)). The show was a
major critical and popular success and Galassi’s
fluent and scholarly catalogue was in the best of
MoMA’s educational traditions.
Influence of Photography on MoMA
Written into the mission statement of MoMA is the
central principle of education. As well being a legal
requirement for the Museum’s foundation in the
city of New York, Barr, Goodyear, and the foun-
ders had a burning desire to spread the message of
modern art. Photography enabled the spread of this
message: bringing the inaccessible to the public in
three separate ways. First, the Museum used photo-
graphy as a marketing device to attract visitors.
Second, it allowed the Museum to arrange exhibi-
tions where the original work could not be viewed.
The Museum often displayed architecture—an
inconceivable undertaking without the ability to
photograph and collate pictures of buildings in
one gallery. Likewise the site installations of the
conceptual art movements would have been sub-
stantially different had photography not existed or
had museums such as MoMA not taken photo-
graphs seriously as a mode of display. Third, photo-
graphy allowed exhibitions to extend beyond the
Museum. Starting in 1933, Elodie Courter was tak-
ing ‘‘Circulating Exhibitions’’ around the city and
the country for those who could not get to MoMA
itself. The success of these touring exhibitions
depended on their use of photographs to illustrate
the art that could be seen at the Museum. Both the
architectural displays and the Circulating Exhibi-
tions pre-dated the Department of Photography,
but were, each in their own way, crucial to the
development of MoMA as an aesthetically broad-
based, artistic, and educational facility.
Over the course of the century the Museum be-
came increasingly concerned with market for-
ces and the commodification of the building and
collection. This explains the Board of Trustees aban-
donment of Barr’s original plan to divest non-con-
temporary art—the artworks had simply become too
valuable to discard—and decision to sell the build-
ing’s air space in the face of widespread public con-
demnation. Photography played an important part
in this self-conscious movement of the Museum
towards treating its own art as a commodity. The
building on 53rd Street set a new standard for
museums in providing a street view that looked
more like a shop than a museum and for providing,
in its entry-level lobby space, a large shop from
which it was possible to buy cheap prints of works
from the permanent collection and some from the
temporary exhibitions. More than any other
museum MoMA gave its shop a position of promi-
nence and sold photographs to its visitors by the
million—in the form of catalogues, books, post-
cards, and posters.
As well as its building, its subject, and its collec-
tion, MoMA has managed to successfully package
and sell the scholarship of its curators. MoMA has
justly become famous for the quality of its publica-
tions. However, not only the Department of Photo-
graphy, but the Departments of Film, Painting,
Sculpture, and Architecture all relied on photogra-
phy to make their books compelling, and in many
cases, even possible.Influence of MoMA on Photography
In addition to being so highly influenced by photo-
graphy in the spheres of education and marketing
as to be unthinkable without it, MoMA had a
profound effect on photography in the aesthetic
and commercial spheres. Although the acceptance
of photography into exhibition space was part of a
larger social movement towards the democratiza-
tion of art, MoMA was the institution that wielded
most influence to secure photography its own place
in the museum. By treating photography as a
recognizable and distinct genre, and one whose
aesthetic had to be treated seriously, MoMA gave
the discipline a sense of identity andgravitas.
Initially this sense only extended as far as the
museums that took their lead from MoMA but, by
the late 1970s and 1980s, this soon spread to com-
mercial auction houses, raising the prices of photo-
graphic prints. This was partly due to the assumption
that art, in general, was a good investment and partly
due to increased demand from collectors whose
appetite had been whetted by MoMA’s ceaseless
proselytizing. Photography would not have beenMUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF NEW YORK, THE