Lightbox Gallery Talk: Your Story Has Touched My Heart—Presence & Absence

Your Story Has Touched My Heart is a video installation exploring the Harvard Art Museums’ remarkable American Professional Photographers Collection. Acquired by sociologist and pioneering photo-historian Barbara Norfleet during her career in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, the collection spans the late 19th and most of the 20th century and includes nearly 20,000 images. The photographs depict the hopes and dreams—and fears—of Americans as they imagined themselves at their best. They were taken inside and outside the studio—at weddings, holidays, house fires, funerals, and a wide variety of other occasions.

Your Story Has Touched My Heart, created by artists Sarah Newman and Matthew Battles from metaLAB (at) Harvard, combines these photographs with new video footage, sound, and fragments of text that put the work in dialogue with memory, individuality, ephemerality, and the meaning of visual abundance as these images find their way in the digital realm.

In this special one-hour gallery talk, Newman and Battles will explore several questions about the installation: what does the American Professional Photographers Collection represent? What does it not represent? What is present and what is absent, explicitly and implicitly? The artists will discuss both what is seen and invisible in the work, including how gender and race are represented. They will also talk about their process of contending with presence and absence in the collection, and bringing criticality and curiosity to bear on the work through text, sound, and structure.

Free with museums admission. This talk is limited to 15 people and tickets are required. Ten minutes before the talk, tickets will become available at the admissions desk.

Please meet in the Calderwood Courtyard, in front of the digital screens between the shop and the admissions desk. Museums staff will be on hand to collect tickets.