Diane Neumaier, photographer and faculty member at Rutgers University, first encountered Russian conceptual photography, including the work of Ukrainian Boris Michailov, in John P. Jacob’s exhibition The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography from the Soviet Union (List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 1990). Neumaier traveled to Russia for the first time in 1991, and was later a Fulbright Fellow (1993-1994) in Moscow, hosted by the Russian Union of Art Photographers. Building on the long-term collecting interest in Soviet non-conformist art at Rutgers and the Zimmerli Art Museum, she organized Beyond memory: Soviet Non-conformist Photography for the Zimmerli in 1994, with an accompanying symposium and published anthology. Jacob was a panelist and moderator at the symposium, and the anthology credited his projects as foundational to the work of later historians such as herself. Neumaier also guest-edited a special issue of the College Art Association’s Art Journal on Contemporary Russian Art Photography, for which Jacob’s After Roskolnikov was the lead article.
