March 6 – 29, 2003
I was not a photographer when my own three sons were growing up. Perhaps this is one reason I have taken hundreds of photographs of my grandchildren. These children are among the affluent in America, new bikes, up to date computers, after school activities—much better off than their fathers were. I think of them as rich but none of them feel rich and they all worry about having money for college. The mothers all had full time careers when they were very young and two still do. I was a full-time mother when my children were young. I do not know if this makes my own children luckier or less lucky. Our worrisome world has been part of my grandchildren’s lives since they were born. The news of the world came into my house when the children were young by means of child unfriendly newspapers. The major difficulty photographing my grandchildren is that I am always torn between participating and photographing. I have solved this by only allowing myself about 10 minutes of photography when I am with them. I then regret pictures I see but have no camera in hand to take.
Barbara Norfleet (born 1926) is a photographer, scholar and curator based in the Boston area. After receiving her Ph.D. in social relations from Harvard, she went on to serve as curator of photography at the university’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. where her groundbreaking collecting strategy and scholarship focused on the work of professional photographers and the representation of everyday American life. Norfleet’s own photography has been widely exhibited and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Center for Photography, in New York among others. She has been honored with numerous awards and fellowships including the Focus Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Griffin Museum of Photography, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the recipient of an honorary degree from Swarthmore College.