20th Century Photographers

9Peter Galassi

Photo Pro, April 1992

At the time of this interview Peter Galassi (b. 1951) had recently been appointed as director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had been on the curatorial staff at MoMA for over ten years, but his affiliation with the museum goes back further than that: he worked there as a student intern in 1974–75 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. And while a graduate student majoring in art history at Columbia, he was invited by John Szarkowski to curate an exhibition entitled “Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography,” in 1981.

Galassi had already organized ten exhibitions at MoMA and written several outstanding catalogs to accompany those shows, including ...