Conversations: Stephen Shore & Makeda Best

We are delighted to host pioneering photographer Stephen Shore and newly named MoMA Curator Makeda Best for our next Conversations panel on Sunday, August 16, 3–5 PM. They will discuss Shore's work (currently in the CPW Upstate Photography Biennial), Best’s views on the state of contemporary photography, and the Upstate Photography Biennial at CPW. A reception and book signing will follow.

Stephen Shore was the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, and his influential exhibitions at Light Gallery in the 1970s helped establish color photography as a serious artistic medium. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art presented a landmark retrospective spanning his entire career, cementing his status as a central figure in photographic history. Among his more than 30 books, in 1998 he published The Nature of Photographs, a key text on visual perception, which he expands on in his forthcoming book The Mental Image (MACK, 2026). Since 1982, he has served as Director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

A curator and scholar specializing in American photography, Makeda Best was recently appointed the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Best is a author of Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th Century America (Penn State Press, 2020). Her exhibition catalog, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970 (Harvard Art Museums/Yale University Press, 2022), was awarded the Photography Catalogue of the Year Award at the 2022 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards. Her most recent exhibition, American Job:1940-2011 was presented at the International Center for Photography in 2025. Best earned her PhD from Harvard University.

Banner image © Stephen Shore