About

Inspired by the McEvoy Family Collection’s extensive holdings of portraiture, Image Gardeners assembles eight decades of portrait photography by women and non-binary makers who reflect, reframe, and resist dominant conventions of representation. In opposition to Susan Sontag’s theory that photography is a “voracious way of seeing,” an image gardener employs photographic seeing as a means of cultivation, preservation, and collaboration.

In self-portraits by Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, and others, the artist uses the mechanics of the camera to assert their control over their image. …