Timely and Timeless

A New Orleans native, John H. Lawrence was responsible for building the extensive photographic holdings at HNOC, where he worked for 46 years before retiring as director of museum programs at the end of 2020. As HNOC’s head of curatorial collections, Lawrence oversaw holdings numbering more than half a million items. He has written and lectured widely about contemporary and historic photography and about the administration and preservation of pictorial collections, and he has curated dozens of exhibitions on a wide range of photographic, artistic, and general historical topics. His latest publication is the HNOC book Louisiana Lens: Photographs from the Historic New Orleans Collection.  

Jeff Rosenheim has worked at the Met for twenty-five years, and is Curator in Charge of the department of photographs. He is a specialist in American photography and was the curator of the Met's lauded 2013 traveling exhibition Photography and the American Civil War.

Rosenheim is the author or co-author of some twenty books on Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Robert Polidori, and Paul Graham, among others. A frequent lecturer in the United States and abroad, he has taught the history of photography and studio art at Columbia University, the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU), Cooper Union, and Bard College. Rosenheim is currently at work on an exhibition and publication of the early photographs (1956–1962) of Diane Arbus.