Your Story Has Touched My Heart

Your Story Has Touched My Heart is a video installation exploring the Harvard Art Museums’ remarkable American Professional Photographers Collection. Acquired by sociologist and pioneering photo-historian Barbara Norfleet during her career in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, the collection spans the late 19th and most of the 20th century and includes nearly 20,000 images. The photographs depict the hopes and dreams—and fears—of Americans as they imagined themselves at their best. They were taken inside and outside the studio—at weddings, holidays, house fires, funerals, and a wide variety of other occasions.

Your Story Has Touched My Heart, created by artists Sarah Newman and Matthew Battles from metaLAB (at) Harvard, combines these photographs with new video footage, sound, and fragments of text that put the work in dialogue with memory, individuality, ephemerality, and the meaning of visual abundance as these images find their way in the digital realm.