Director's Message

It is a particular pleasure to introduce Lost & Found: Rediscovering Early Photographic Processes to our scholarly and general publics. This exhibition curated by USC's graduate Museum Studies Program in the Department of Art History is a hallmark of our training program for museum professionals. Exhibition training, catalogue preparation, along with art acquisition training, preventative conservation, and exposure to other aspects of museum work, prepare our students to begin careers in the curatorial, educational, and administrative areas of the museum world - they are all well prepared to meet the many challenges of this very dynamic field.

Students do not, however, complete their work alone. For their exhibition, they are supervised by curators from our neighboring museums. In the case of Lost & Found, Robert Sobieszek, Deputy Director and Curator of Photography of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, guided them throughout the last three semesters, encouraging them as they struggled to solve problems related to interpretation and presentation of the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes being researched. Indeed, this is the second time Mr. Sobieszek has been the intellectual force behind one of our exhibitions, and I wish to acknowledge his deep engagement with USC along with our expanding relationship to LACMA. At the same time, I should note that this previously unstudied body of material was first brought to our attention by Sarah Lee. It was she who realized that there was an important opportunity for collaboration among institutions that we needed to seize. We thank Ms. Lee for thinking of us so opportunely.

The photographic material that forms the core of this exhibition has as its home the Seaver Center of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The Seaver Center is now, thanks to Victoria Steele (formerly the Head of USC's special collections library), an affiliated library of the University of Southern California. Dr. Jerry Campbell, Chief Information Officer and Dean of the USC Libraries, has generously developed and furthered that affiliation. We are proud of this and hope that our exhibition helps us to expand upon that relationship and to develop additional programming together. I would also like to thank the Director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, James Powell, for encouraging our project and for allowing his staff to pursue such an unconventional effort. His Deputy Director Ann Muscat has been a support to our Program, as has Janet Fireman, Curator and Chair of History and Material Culture at the Museum, and we are most grateful to them both as well.

Still, it is USC itself to which we owe the opportunity to develop projects such as Lost & Found. Provost Lloyd Armstrong has funded the Arts Initiative that permits us in the arts to explore further than we initially had hoped we could, whenever we embark upon a new arts project. Because of the Arts Initiative, this exhibition has expanded dramatically to include contemporary artists who found these old photographic processes and made them new. Further, the support of the Arts Initiative has allowed for an exciting series of artist demonstrations and a vibrant interactive component developed by members of Fisher's USC Interactive Art Museum team.

Of course we could never even begin our exhibition projects without the continuing support of the Department of Art History of the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and I thus extend my thanks to Eunice Howe, Acting Chair of Art History, and to Joseph Aoun, Dean of Letters, Arts and Sciences. And, Jane Pisano, Executive Vice President of External Affairs has always encouraged our involvement in the surrounding community, especially Exposition Park. The Fisher Gallery staff has, as always made the exhibition possible and I would like to thank them one and all. Finally, our President Steven B. Sample has been an eloquent leader who has always acknowledged the centrality of the arts to USC and has never failed to celebrate our achievements.

Congratulations to the Museum Studies Class of 2002. You have fulfilled your curatorial responsibilities honorably and creatively. We are all proud of you and hope that the public, scholars, and artists will learn from and enjoy your exhibition of photographic works both lost and found.

Selma Holo
Director, Museum Studies Program and Fisher Gallery

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