Two recent acquisitions of work by up-and-coming women photographers, Haley Morris-Cafiero and Habiba Nowrose, embrace the performative aspects of portraiture, one of photography’s oldest genres, to confront societal expectations around body image and identity.

The institutionalization and historicization of photography began with rigor in the 1970s. Since then, the Davis Museum has stewarded and grown a robust photography collection that represents a range of approaches, uses, and interpretations of the medium. From the vernacular to the iconic, from serial projects to singular works, recent acquisitions continue to expand the geographic, cultural, and technical scope of the museum’s photographic holdings.

Haley Morris-Cafiero (b. 1976, Memphis, Tenn.) holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is a lecturer in photography at the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University, Ireland. She was nominated for a Prix Pictet in 2014 and was a 2016 Fulbright finalist. She has had solo exhibitions at UPI Gallery in New York, the University of Dayton, and the Centre de la Photographie Genève in Geneva, Switzerland.

Habiba Nowrose (b. 1989, Dhaka, Bangladesh) holds an MS in women’s and gender studies from the University of Dhaka and is currently enrolled in the Professional Program on Photography at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. Her series, Concealed, was a finalist for the 2018 Invisible Photographers Awards.  

Curated by Carrie Cushman, Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography.