In Person: Sarah Meister on Photography’s Frictions
Responding to globally burgeoning image cultures, explorations and experiments with and around photography, the international symposium Image Worlds: Approaching the Bicentennial of Photography unfolded at the India International Centre in New Delhi on 25 and 26 July 2025. Supported by PhotoSouthAsia and co-presented by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Offset Projects and Maze Collective Studio, the gathering brought together leading practitioners, researchers and scholars from diverse backgrounds to reflect on the shifts and evolutions within photography today.
At the symposium, as part of the series In Person, ASAP | art speaks with Sarah Meister—who, in this edited conversation, reflects on her experiences at the helm of cultural institutions, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Aperture, tracing connections and intertwinings between the two, while thinking through the different roles they play in shaping the medium of photography. Through her relationship with photographers and photographic practices, Meister revisits the trajectories that have shaped photographic histories and considers practices contributing to them in the contemporary.
Moving through photography’s uneasy relationship with art as a disciplinary framework, Meister briefly touches upon historical tensions between the two; what that friction has produced and the kinds of vocabularies that have since been assimilated at the threshold of lens-based media. Looking at what an insistence on calling oneself a photographer entails today, she notes that her primary takeaway across her experiences with institutions and people was to actively encourage conversations around practice and creative self-identification to “begin with photography but without apology.”
Further on, Meister reiterates her longstanding interest in transnational dialogues on photography, adding emphasis on her engagement with amateur networks, the audiences they address—within and outside South Asian geographies—and the effervescent spaces of exchange they create. Returning to the ways photography has taught her to value empathy and attentiveness as central to the medium today, Meister inquires: What is it that draws us back to the photograph?
Sarah Meister is a distinguished curator, writer, and arts executive currently serving as the Executive Director of Aperture, the New York based photography foundation and publisher. In this role, she oversees the organisation’s publishing, exhibition and educational programs, continuing Aperture’s mission to connect the photo community with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other. Prior to joining Aperture in May 2021, Meister spent over two decades at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Some of her most notable exhibitions include Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (2021) and Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020). Her writings include foundational texts accompanying her exhibitions, contributions to independent journals and works such as Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now, a key volume in the museum's history.
Recorded on 26 July 2025.
To learn more about the symposium Image Worlds: Approaching the Bicentennial of Photography 2025, watch previous episodes of In Person featuring Bhumika Sarawati’s conversations with Subash Thebe Limbu as he speaks about Adivasi Futurism and with Yazid Anani on colonial imagery in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians as well as Mallika Visvanathan’s interviews with Nimaya Harris on her engagement with the Minnette de Silva Archive and Neelika Jayawardane on writing alongside photographic images.
