Genevra Kornbluth	Home	Historical Archive	My Publishers	Contact
Documenting the Visual Arts

My first love was not photography, but art history– a big surprise to me, because until college I always hated history classes. Then I discovered that history is not all about rulers and battles. It is rather the sum of all great stories, of people’s ideas as well as their lives. Some of those stories are written in the objects that they have created and used, and art history lets us read such narratives.

My first career was spent learning to understand the visual record and helping others to see it, getting a Ph.D. in art history (University of North Carolina 1986), publishing a book and many articles, and teaching college and graduate students. Along the way I found that photographs taken by other people never seemed to show the parts of objects that interested me most, so I developed techniques to document the minuscule traces of production and use as well as the luminous surfaces of gems or the tangled solidity of wrought iron. On the left below is a standard museum image, on the right one of mine with custom lighting.

Today, in my second career, I am an object and architecture photographer.

I continue to explore material culture, now revealing its complexity for museums, art and antique dealers, historians, private collectors, and others interested in reading the stories of the past and present. And if someone will lend me a time machine, I’ll be happy to relate the stories of the future! Want to see who publishes my photographs? Click here. My experience is summarized in my LinkedIn profile.

Image courtesy of Volker Schimpff.

Copyright © 2019 Genevra Kornbluth. Last updated February 12, 2019.