Mia Fineman is an American photography curator, critic, and author based in New York City. Since 1997 she has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she currently serves as the curator of photographs. Her career bridges museum practice and independent writing, bringing a scholarly yet accessible eye to the history of photography, with particular emphasis on the medium’s long entanglement with manipulation and deception. She trained at Yale University and has contributed criticism to publications such as Slate, establishing a voice that speaks to both academic and general audiences.

Fineman’s intellectual focus centers on photography’s double nature—its claim to truth and its persistent, often playful, use of alteration. Unlike many curators who celebrate pristine prints, she has made manipulated and staged images the core of her research, treating retouching, montage, and digital editing not as corruptions but as integral threads in the medium’s fabric. Her curatorial approach often pairs rigorous historical research with a willingness to embrace vernacular and popular imagery, setting her apart from peers who might gravitate toward canonical gallery prints.

Her landmark book, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (2012), was published in conjunction with a major exhibition at The Met. It traces techniques from early double exposure to hand-coloring and photomontage, arguing that Photoshop is not a rupture but a digital extension of practices as old as photography itself. Another notable exhibition, Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (2019), examined the Moon’s visual history through the lens of astronomy, art, and Apollo missions, rethinking how photographic technology has shaped human perception of the cosmos. She also curated Casa Susanna (2022–2023), drawing from a newly discovered family album to illuminate a 1960s cross-dressing community in the Catskills, demonstrating her skill in yielding nuanced social history from unassuming photographs.

Fineman has organized numerous exhibitions spanning the full history of the medium, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary commissions. She has also participated in symposia such as Truth, Lies, and Photographs, where she publicly engaged with questions of authenticity in the digital era. In addition to museum catalogues, her writing appears in Slate, often critiquing photojournalism and visual culture. Through her dual roles as curator and critic, she has become a respected mediator between advanced scholarly debate and public discourse.

For collectors, Fineman’s work offers a crucial counterpoint to the myth of photographic purity. Her books and exhibitions invite a deeper appreciation of photographic retouching as a creative and conceptual genre, influencing how archival prints and manipulated objects should be evaluated. Collectors interested in vernacular photography, pre-digital trickery, or the social framing of images will find in her curation a useful entry point, as her shows consistently foreground the material traces of handwork and distribution. Her scholarship encourages collectors to look beyond surface realism, toward the layers of intent that have always shaped photographic meaning.

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