Curators Biographies
Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric

Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman have been catalysts in the fields of photography, publishing and art for more than 20 years. Since 1991, they have worked collaboratively as partners in the New York-based company, Lookout. At Lookout, they have organized the museum exhibitions Fame After Photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, Talking Pictures: People Speak about the Photographs that Speak to Them, which opened at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1994 and traveled thereafter to museums nationwide, and the nationally traveling exhibition, To the Rescue: Eight Artists in An Archive (1999), which presented contemporary artworks based on the archive of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Lookout books include the widely-heralded, Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream (Collins, 1996); Mr. Salesman, edited by Diane Keaton (Twin Palms, 1993); and, in collaboration with artist William Wegman, Fay's Fairy Tales: Cinderella and Little Red Riding-Hood (Hyperion Books, New York, 1993). Lookout's work has been called "provocative and smart," by The New Yorker, and identified by publications coast to coast-including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Los Angeles Times--as expanding the boundaries of popular visual communication.

Marvin Heiferman co-curated Image World (1989) at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Indomitable Spirit for Photographers and Friends United Against AIDS (1990) directly before co-founding Lookout. He served as editor of Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture 1986)-producing a multi-media presentation of Goldin's book at the Berlin Film Festival that same year-and co-authored with Diane Keaton the book Still Life (Callaway, 1983). In the 1980s, as director of photography for Castelli Gallery, New York, and later as a freelance curator, Heiferman organized more than a hundred exhibitions of contemporary and historical photographs for museums, government cultural agencies and art galleries in the United States and Europe. Heiferman has served as a consultant on photography for the Chase Manhattan Bank Art Program, Goldman and Sachs, Polaroid Corporation and The Bank of America. His articles and essays appear regularly in books, museum catalogues and magazines.

Kismaric joined Heiferman in establishing Lookout just as she completed packaging Forced Out: The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time (1989) for the J.M. Kaplan Fund and Human Rights Watch, and co-organizing a traveling exhibition of the materials. Forced Out was distributed internationally by a consortium of publishers that included Random House, William Morrow, W.W. Norton, and Penguin Books Ltd. Kismaric established the publications program for P.S1, the international contemporary art center in Long Island Queens, in 1985, and has overseen the production of more than 25 publications there. She served as the editorial director of The Aperture Foundation for nearly a decade, until 1985, and was co-director, with John Szarkowski, of the exhibition, From the Picture Press, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974. From 1970 to 1976, Kismaric worked as picture editor and associate editor at Time-Life Books, where she was instrumental in developing a number of noted book series, including the Time-Life Photography Series.

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