Museum of Fine Arts

Collection Conversations: Childhood

Collection Conversations brings together artworks from the Museum’s encyclopedic permanent collection, allowing for an exploration of themes across times and geographies. Viewers are invited to investigate aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural juxtapositions among artworks that might not otherwise be exhibited together.

This second in the series examines western representations of children and childhood objects from the Eighteenth Century until the present. The media presented here is diverse, from Winslow Homer’s popular illustrations of children and their activities from Harper’s Weekly to Polixeni Papapetrou’s contemporary restaging of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian photographs of costumed children.… Continued

Corpus of Meaning: Figures Through the Lens of Female Photographers

Is there a distinctly female approach to photographing the body? If so, then what is it? In the 19th century, female photographers were believed to be better portraitists because they supposedly avoided the mechanical approach taken by male photographers. Another stereotype was that female photographers had an intuitive ability to arrange a studio and put sitters at ease, as well as a talent for arranging hair and garments.… Continued