Curating the curators | Scene Through the Lens

The Mickey Mouse company’s 100th anniversary year kicked off in Philadelphia with the opening of ‘Disney100: The Exhibition,’ premiering at the Franklin Institute. This week I covered a preview for the media, influencers and Gold Members of D23 - the Disney fan club (the 23 stands for 1923, the year the company was founded. The D for, you know).

I have always enjoyed visiting museums, and for the newspaper, I especially enjoy looking at museum displays, objects and artifacts and deciding what to photograph. I’m not there to catalog an exhibit. I can’t photograph everything, so I like to think of my job as curating the curator, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, masterpieces outdoors, student art, attic treasures, employee collections, or even store window displays.

I am usually also illustrating a story, where a reporter is deciding what they like. For the Disney exhibition, I got to photograph the items and areas that my colleague Stephanie Farr wrote about: five things that shouldn’t be missed. Plus, I find it fun to see what other news organizations found interesting, like Emma Lee at WHYY, Hannah Yoon for The New York Times or Philly’s Disney owned TV station, 6ABC.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column