Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions is an archival initiative and the first research project of its kind, devoted to recording and making public the untold histories of the formation of the field of photography in the United States from the 1970s through 1990s. The first stage of the project will focus on the roles and professional lives of five important curators who collectively shaped this history: Sarah Greenough, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sandra Phillips, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and Deborah Willis. Through conducting individual, long-form interviews with each participant and then bringing them all together in conversation, Framing the Field will explore central issues that impacted them across their disparate careers and institutions, and the means by which they worked through them. Engaging in a methodological approach of layering, it will examine the interconnectivity of key problems and practices through a handful of different frames, including gender, geography, relationships, and institutional structures, to reconsider how disparate unrecognized factors have informed our received ideas of photography. The project maintains that such transparency is essential to both complicating the dominant narratives of the field, and understanding the current terrain curators face. Directed by Allison Pappas and Natalie Zelt, this independent project is hosted by the Visual Studies Workshop.