Judith Keller, new head of the Getty’s department of photographs, is expanding the collection’s scope

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Judith Keller, the new head of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s department of photographs, is looking toward Asia -- and beyond. She’s been increasing the representation of images from Japan, China and Korea as the first step in expanding the scope of the Getty’s collection, which has been focused on pre-1950 photography from Europe and America.

‘We want to have a wider view of photography,’ says Keller, ‘and to see what artists working in photography are doing now.’ Along that line, she adds, ‘we also hope to build up our contemporary works.’

Keller, who joined the Getty in 1986, had been serving as the acting head of the department since the retirement of founding curator Weston Naef in January 2009. She was named to the top job, senior curator of photographs, last month.

‘In 1984, Weston and the museum created what is one of the best collections of photography in the world,’ says Keller, ‘and we want to continue to build on that collection.’ She notes that hers is the only department at the Getty that ‘can and does collect non-European art and art after 1900. So we have a big responsibility.’

Keller’s interest in East Asia is inspired by her own travels and by the Getty’s Pacific Rim location and audience. ‘We’re a long way from having the kind of extensive collection of Eastern art that rivals the Western collection but we are at least adding examples so people will be able to see this kind of work.’

‘Our goal is not to collect just one photograph by, say, 50 significant Japanese artists but to look at perhaps a dozen artists and collect each of them in depth.’

In the next year or so, she adds, she plans to look to other continents, possibly Africa and South America.

Another priority is maintaining the originality and quality of the exhibition program. The department of photographs has been able to mount more than a hundred shows, thanks to the size of its collection and the abundance of gallery space created by the opening of the 7,000-square-foot Center for Photographs in 2006.

The museum possesses more than 65,000 prints and hundreds of albums -- a number that keeps rising. ‘We received almost 1,000 photographs as gifts in 2009,’ Keller says.

Before joining the Getty, Keller was at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery (now the Blanton Museum of Art) at the University of Texas at Austin. At the Getty, she has worked on more than 20 exhibitions, including ‘Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection,’ the show that inaugurated the Center for Photographs.

-- Karen Wada

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