Standard For Success

Catherine Wagner (American, b. 1953)
Standard For Success, 1988
Photograph
24 × 18 in.

Wagner's photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, the V&A, LACMA, and SFMoMA. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. Professor of Art at Mills College since 1979.

A photograph from Wagner's ongoing investigation of American institutions — classrooms, laboratories, construction sites, the built environments where culture gets made and transmitted. This image carries the cool, precise eye she brings to every subject. Wagner photographs systems, not moments.