Museum of Fine Arts

Unearthing Ancient Nubia

Unearthing Ancient Nubia

Specially trained Egyptian photographers were an integral part of the pioneering Harvard-MFA expedition during the first half of the 20th century. Over the course of some 40 years, their photographs documented the excavations with thousands of images as the riches of a great ancient civilization in northern Sudan were uncovered. George A. Reisner, the leader of the expedition, was keenly…
Atget: Postcards of a Lost Paris

Atget: Postcards of a Lost Paris

Few places on Earth have been as lovingly, almost fanatically, documented as Paris. Despite extraordinary growth and change, the Paris of the world’s imagination is still, to a remarkable degree, the Paris of the turn of the 20th century―the Paris captured by Eugène Atget. The postcards in this book, which were more or less Atget’s only publications during his lifetime,…
Herb Ritts: WORK

Herb Ritts: WORK

Herb Ritts (1952–2002) was a leading American fashion photographer of the 1980s and 1990s, known for his beautifully printed, formally bold, and sensual black-and-white images of supermodels such as Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. This new exhibition of the photographer’s work revisits the artist, whose groundbreaking 1996 retrospective, “Herb Ritts: WORK,” remains one of the most popular exhibitions in MFA…
Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott

Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott

Gordon Parks, one of the most celebrated African American artists of his time, is the subject of this exhibition of groundbreaking photographs of Fort Scott, Kansas—focusing on the realities of life under segregation during the 1940s, but also relating to Parks’s own fascinating life story. In 1948, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) became the first African American photographer to be hired full…