About Photo Soup
Photo Soup is an annual initiative to collect and share personal histories of workers in the broad field of photography. Its core is an annual multi-day retreat in Rockingham, Vermont, during which six to eight invited participants consider their individual paths into photography in both formal presentations and informal talks, loosely organized around a given theme. Invited participants represent a wide range of the photographic sphere, including curation, academia, publishing, commerce, and artistic practice, with an emphasis on less-heard voices.
Photography’s structures, both technological and philosophical, have changed significantly in its short history, and Photo Soup participants have engaged these shifts in myriad ways. The question “How did I get here?” is considered in every Photo Soup presentation: this premise makes room for outliers and offers a deeply human approach to a discipline that has long been defined by canon and a few great men. The personal stories of Photo Soup—often wayward, always candid—preserve specific memories and experiences, and demonstrate the generous embrace of the photographic field.
Photo Soup Goals:
to promote collegial conversations across a wide spectrum of practices, with an emphasis on voices heard less often
to pay particular attention to the changing infrastructures, economies, and networks that have developed over the past few decades
to preserve these conversations as a record of specific informed perspectives during this era of dramatic change in the field
Each year’s Photo Soup conversations are collected in a modest, handsomely produced publication. The Photo Soup volumes are of interest to students, researchers, practitioners, historians, and others involved in the life and ecosystem—the soup—of photography. Get a copy here.
About the Photo Soup Directors
Alison Nordström
Photo by Dominic Chavez
Alison Nordström is an independent scholar, writer, and curator specializing in photography, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her long career in the field includes positions as Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography (FL), and Senior Curator of Photographs/Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House (NY). Nordström has worked extensively with photographers and photographic institutions in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and is widely published on photographic topics.
She has curated over one hundred photographic exhibitions in nine countries, including Lewis Hine; Truth/Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945; and Ideas in Things: Photography and Materiality. In 2015 and 2016 she was Artistic Director of Fotofestiwal Lodz, in Poland. She was the curator of Joan Fontcuberta: Crisis of History for the Hamburg (Germany) Photographic Triennial in 2018, and of FINDINGS: Photographs by Torben Eskerod, on view in 2020–21 at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. She is currently a Research Associate in Photography at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.
Diana Stoll
Photo by Joanne Chan
Diana Stoll is a writer, editor, and curator based in Asheville, North Carolina. She has stewarded scores of art and photography books to publication for cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Aperture; and she served from 2004 to 2013 as Senior Editor of Aperture magazine. Among her many editorial projects are monographs on Wolfgang Tillmans (MoMA, 2022) and Jimmy DeSana (Brooklyn Museum, 2023), and Melissa Harris’s biography of Josef Koudelka (Aperture, 2023).
She has contributed critical writings to outlets including Aperture magazine, Hyperallergic, and Burnaway, and she was a major contributor to Abbeville’s 2019 edition of A World History of Photography. Stoll’s curatorial projects include photo+sphere, a citywide photography event in Asheville; Altering Nature: Pictures of a Changing Environment (Tracey Morgan Gallery, 2018); and Black Mountain College and Mexico (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2023).
Streamway Foundation Trust
Photo Soup is a project of Streamway Foundation Trust. Streamway was founded in 1989, originally for the purpose of furthering the aims of human-service organizations through the use of audiovisual and telecommunications technologies. Additionally, the foundation supports individual artists as well as arts organizations and other cultural and educational initiatives. Since 2017, Streamway has hosted artists-in-residence from around the country at its studio facility in Rockingham, Vermont. Streamway is a 501(c)(3) organization.