A new light in MoMA's photography department

Where will the darkness go?

When people ask who will lead a museum’s photography department, most reach for a list of names. I ask a different question first: where will that institution place the darkness from now on?

Makeda Best and the empty seat

In early June, MoMA named Makeda Best as the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. She starts in September. She comes from the Oakland Museum of California and previously curated photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Since Clement Cheroux left for Paris in 2022, Roxana Marcoci has carried the seat in an interim role for years. Four years is a long silence. A major collection still breathes in that time—but when its direction is unclear, that breath grows thin.

MoMA as memory

For me, MoMA is not only a prestigious name. It is a memory that also holds my own work. Since 1940 it has brought photography into the language of modern art, archiving how an era looked through more than thirty thousand works. Whoever leads that department manages not a shop window, but a point of view.

Why Best matters

That is why Best’s appointment matters. She is the first Black curator—and the first woman—to hold the post permanently. Writing a footnote in history is easy. The hard part is which faces, which labor, and which fragility will reach the wall after that footnote. She is a photographer herself. She studied with Allan Sekula at CalArts and earned her doctorate at Harvard. She knows both the back of the camera and the weight of the archive. Her 2025 exhibition American Job at the International Center of Photography read work and American labor through images. It intersects with what I have seen for years in fashion: glitter is not enough. The real question is what the person under the light is hiding.

Intention and gaze

MoMA’s new director, Christophe Cherix, says Best connects photography to sociology, environment, performance, labor, and public life. It can sound like press language. But when the right name is chosen for the right seat, even press language carries intention. Best’s own words are clearer: photography remains indispensable for understanding who we are. MoMA is one of the rare institutions that can still make room for that.

A map in motion

New York’s photography scene does not stand still. Names move from MoMA to the Met; viewpoints slide from one institution to another. Best is not sitting down at an empty table; she is entering a map already in motion. When she walks through the door in September, she will face not only a collection, but four years of expectation.

What will hang on the wall

As a photographer I know this: an institution’s identity shows not in catalogue copy, but in the faces it chooses. MoMA’s choice may widen—and perhaps honestify—modernity’s visual definition a little further. The real essay does not begin now. It begins in the works that will hang on the wall in the seasons ahead.

Light is everywhere. The question is where to place the darkness.

— Egemen Mustafa Şener