Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
From the 1970s to the early ’80s a group of young artists in Boston, several of whom were then students at the SMFA, made intimate and ephemeral self-portraits and photographs of their friends and lovers. By turning their cameras on themselves, artists including Nan Goldin, Gail Thacker, and Mark Morrisroe radically refuted the documentary traditions of a previous generation of Boston photographers as well as that of their teachers. Learn about how these artists redefined the material conditions of photography to capture fleeting instances of tenderness, intimacy, vulnerability, and loss within the cultural and political landscape of the time.
Part of the course series, "Creative Networks: The Boston Art Scene in the 1970s and ’80s."
Lynne Cooney, director of Exhibitions and Galleries, Monserrat College of Art
From the 1970s to the early ’80s a group of young artists in Boston, several of whom were then students at the SMFA, made intimate and ephemeral self-portraits and photographs of their friends and lovers. By turning their cameras on themselves, artists including Nan Goldin, Gail Thacker, and Mark Morrisroe radically refuted the documentary traditions of a previous generation of Boston photographers as well as that of their teachers. Learn about how these artists redefined the material conditions of photography to capture fleeting instances of tenderness, intimacy, vulnerability, and loss within the cultural and political landscape of the time.
Part of the course series, "Creative Networks: The Boston Art Scene in the 1970s and ’80s."
Lynne Cooney, director of Exhibitions and Galleries, Monserrat College of Art
