This publication highlights the exceptional gift of 108 photographs by women artists from the collection of Helen Kornblum to The Museum of Modern Art. Conceived in conjunction with an exhibition opening at The Museum of Modern Art in 2022, this publication focuses on an exceptional gift of 108 photographs by women artists from the collection of Helen Kornblum, distinguished member of MoMA’s Committee on Photography. The publication will highlight this significant acquisition, which contributes to the Museum’s continuous effort to research and rethink twentieth century art history narratives by amplifying the presence of women artists. Like the exhibition, the book will be structured around thematic groupings, arranged chronologically, and each prefaced by a short text. Special attention will be devoted to topics such as: pictorialist portraiture, surrealist explorations, portraits of artists, the social documentary, advertising, photography and language, photojournalism, gender and the media, still life and domesticity, performance for the camera, and to the camera as a means of personal artistic expression. From modernists such as Claude Cahun and Yva to contemporary photographer Catherine Opie, many of the works in this volume elicit conversations about queer subjectivity. Themes related to colonial history and indigeneity are addressed in photographic projects by both Native artists such as Cara Romero and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and non-Native practitioners including Graciela Iturbide, Sharon Lockhart, Meridel Rubenstein, Tatiana Parcero, and Tracey Moffatt. Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems offer uniquely feminist African-diasporic viewpoints on the relationship of race and gender. Our Selves presents a series of new perspectives that rise to our current moment, addressing the urgent need for more intersectional conversations in the arts.

Published in advance of Wolfgang Tillmans’s forthcoming large-scale survey at MoMA, this anthology brings together for the first time more than thirty years of interviews and texts, offering a unique window into his prodigious writerly output. Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader is a panoramic collection of interviews and writings from an artist for whom language has always been a significant means of creative expression. Arranged chronologically, the assembled texts reflect Tillmans’s thinking on photography, music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality, and activism. The sources are as varied as their content, with statements and conversations that originally appeared in exhibition catalogues rubbing up against social-media posts and song lyrics. Whether discussing his own work as a photographer or drawing out the thoughts of others, Tillmans is a generous interlocutor with a refreshing clarity of thought. This timely and visually rich publication tracks Tillmans’s contributions to art and cultural criticism in tandem with the social and political shifts of the past thirty years. “Wolfgang Tillmans is not only a great artist, he’s a joyous intellectual whose generosity, wit, and good-natured skepticism is political, authentic, and playfully profound. Read this volume and marvel at his highbrow yet unpretentious theories on abstraction combined with a low-level appreciation of the down and dirty. Thrill to Wolfgang’s magically elitist yet of-the-people reinvention of ‘real’ photography and weep at the beauty of his love for the ‘unforeseen.’ Can printed museum art-talk be so smart that it becomes sexually arousing for the reader? Sure it can. And this is just the book to prove that.” ―John Waters “For over thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been surveying culture and politics, as attentive to the production of news as he is to the radical intimacies of the nightclub or protest. Through his lens the world recovers its complexity. In an era of dangerous simplifications, we need his work more than ever.” ―Olivia Laing “In perusing this Reader, I kept on thinking of two things: the generosity that allows the artist to share his worlds with us, and the possibilities of using artistic practice to resist and challenge the asymmetries of our times.” ―Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung