Rebecca Senf

Rebecca Senf, Ph.D. is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Arizona. She has been at the Center, a research center about the history of photography founded in 1975, since 2007.  She curates exhibitions drawn from the Center for Creative Photography’s holdings that go on view in galleries in both Tucson and at the Phoenix Art Museum.  Some of her past exhibitions include Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence; Human Nature: the Photographs of Barbara Bosworth; Odyssey: the Photographs of Linda Connor; Charting the Canyon: Photographs by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe; and Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture.  Her publications include essays in many artist monographs, as well as Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams (2020); To Be Thirteen, works of Betsy Schneider (2017); Reconstucting the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (2012); and Ansel Adams From the Lane Collection (2005, reprinted in 2013).

Senf is open to reviewing any type of work, although she is most likely to be able to comment on photography that is created as personal expression (i.e. yes to landscapes, figure studies, still lives, portraits, auto-biographical work, abstracts, etc. in color, black-and-white, alternative processes, digital or film based – not as helpful with commercial work or photojournalism).  Special interests are artists working with vernacular/snapshot/found imagery, fatherhood, and grief.  She can comment on every step of the art making process from idea to object making, from editing to exhibition presentation, and from sequencing to publication.  Senf’s primary role as a reviewer is to provide constructive criticism and feedback from the museum curatorial perspective, but acquisitions and exhibitions might be possible.  Senf also juries various exhibitions and prizes; can act as a reference on grants; and can write essays for publication.