Flying Horse Farm, Hamilton, Mass.

At age 98, Norfleet is still actively making photographs. Although she was a trailblazer in documentary photography of the postwar era, often in perilous locations such as bombed-out nuclear test sites, she is perhaps even better known for influencing the value that museum institutions and art historians place on documentary and vernacular photography.

Norfleet was a longtime instructor of social psychology and sociology at Harvard University, where she taught a popular course on “Photography as Sociological Description.” She also served as a curator at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, where she developed an archive exploring the social history of the U.S. From 1975 to 1977, she traveled across the country, gathering abandoned prints and negatives from dozens of photography studios that were active from the 1930s to the 1960s. In her curatorial work, as in works such as this one of a horse farm, Norfleet presaged the turn toward the humble, everyday moments of life that have been at the center of photographic discourse since the 1990s.