Keynote Speaker

Henry Jenkins, DeFlorez Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has spent his career studying media and the way people incorporate it into their lives. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, the Federal Committee, The Federal Communications Commission, and the Governors Board of the World Economic Forum. Professor Jenkins is the Principal Investigator for the MacArthur Foundation funded New Media Literacy’s Project. He is also founder and leader of the Education Arcade, which seeks to explore the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. Jenkins has published 12 books and more than fifty essays on popular culture. His books include Convergence Culture (forthcoming), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1999), The Children's Cultural Reader (1998) "What Made Pistachio Nuts": Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1993), Classical Hollywood Comedy (1994), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), and the Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Jenkins holds a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa.

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Carl Toth received an Associate in Applied Science degree in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a B.A. in English Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, in 1970. He received a Masters of Fine Art in Photography in 1972, also from SUNY Buffalo, studying with Donald Blumberg. After graduation he became Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Department of Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art. His writings have appeared in Afterimage, and in various exhibition catalogues. He served as a consultant to and appeared in American Photography: A Century of Images, broadcast nationally on PBS in the fall of 1999.

Toth’s work has been included in exhibitions in museums and galleries such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Albright-Knox Gallery, the New Museum in New York, the Fogg Art Museum, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Australian National Gallery. Toth’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums . He has been awarded three Creative Artist Grants by the Michigan Council for the Arts and three Individual Artist Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named Honored Educator at the Midwest Society for Photographic Education Conference in 2000.

(Photo by Steve Benson)

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Barbara Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Professor Stafford is a writer, historian and curator whose work investigates key intersections between the arts, sciences, and myriad visual technologies from the seventeenth century to the contemporary era. She has written extensively on visual culture and is the author of several books including Body Criticism (1991), Artful Science (1994), and Good Looking (1996). Stafford is co-curator of the exhibition “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen,” at the Getty Museum in 2001. She has received awards and fellowships from numerous institutions including the Smithsonian Institute, Guggenheim Foundation and the Getty Research Institute. Stafford is currently a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany. Barbara Stafford holds an MA degree from Northwestern University and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

(Photo by Barbara Herrenkind)

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John Paul Caponigro attended both Yale University and University of California at Santa Cruz graduating with a BA in Art and Literature in 1988. In 1989 he moved to coastal Maine where he lives with his wife and son. John Paul combines his background in painting with traditional and alternative photographic processes using the digital platform. He is respected internationally as one of the most prominent artists working with digital media processes. Exhibited around the world his work resides in many private and public collections including Princeton University, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Esée Lauder collection.

Well respected as an authority on working creatively with the digital platform and fine digital printing John Paul teaches internationally at prominent workshops including The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, The Maine Photographic Workshops, Toscana Photographic Workshops, The Ansel Adams Workshops and the Rocky Mountain School of Photography among others. His work has been reproduced in books such as The Ansel Adams Guide and Rizzoli’s Oceans book (Robert Redford/Sue Hostetler) as well as numerous museum and exhibition catalogs. John Paul is one of Canon USA’s Explorers of Light and Epson’s Stylus Pros. His clients include Canon, Epson, Imacon, Kodak, Adobe, Epson, Greytag-MacBeth and Apple. This presentation is sponsored by Canon USA, Inc.

Pre-conference event on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 6:30-8:00pm. Event is free, but seating is limited. See pre-registration information.

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Kerry James Marshall is a painter, photographer, printmaker, sculptor and installation artist. With groundbreaking shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, his remarkable talent earned him a Mac Arthur “genius” award in 1997. Marshall’s works can be found in more than 30 public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He has also worked as a production designer for such films as Daughters of the Dust (1989) and the Hendrix Project (1991). Mr. Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate in 1999. His work is often drawn from African-American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing. Kerry James Marshall lives in Chicago and is currently a professor of studio art at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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Epic Photography, Revisited

Epic asserts a narrative not bound by time. Epic describes acknowledged scale. Concerned with actual location, human gesture and cinematic illusion, Carmona’s photographic works are presented in this context of methodology. Over the last decade, epic has grown to the common place. The use of cinema scale printmaking, as well as recognizable actors in personal narratives, introduces a cinematic economy to still photography. Finance, technology and celebrity redirect this genre initially centered around temporal and gestural description. As a teacher, Carmona asks what these practices leave for our students to understand about capital access and imaginative skill.

Working in narrative media, Javier Carmona heads the photography curriculum at Dominican University. His recent solo exhibitions include Galería La Masmédula in Mexico City and Tres50 in Chiapas. His work was featured in the first volume of Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art. Carmona received his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1997.

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The Atlantic Steel Redevelopment Project is a time-line study showing the transformation of an historic industrial site in central Atlanta from a 100-year old steel mill into a new urbanism development. In 1999, Dusseault photographed the Atlantic Steel Mill just after it closed operations. The new developers have since cleared away the old structures to build a new city within the city. She photographed the demolition, environmental remediation, infrastructure construction, the construction of a four-story forty-acre parking deck and the nostalgic surfacing of the new city. Now called Atlantic Station, it is the largest in town redevelopment ever attempted in the U.S. The designs for the new city recall the vernacular of the old mill.

Ruth Dusseault is currently Artist-in-Residence at Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture. Her photography explores the relationship between architecture and utopianism. She has lectured at the Carnegie Museum, High Museum and Michael C. Carlos Museum. Dusseault contributes to Art Papers magazine and curates touring exhibitions that intersect art and architecture.

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Since 2001, Chicago has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of socio/political photographers. Concerned with the themes of consumerism, identity and mass culture, the artists working within this framework approach their subjects through a variety of different strategies; however, when shown together they present a fresh new perspective that is unique to Chicago. This school of artists includes photographers Brian Ulrich, Matt Siber and Jonathan Gitelson, all of whom use digital media to create their work.

Jonathan Gitelson completed his MFA at Columbia College in 2004 and has exhibited throughout the United States and Canada. His work is in various collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Whitney Museum.
Brian Ulrich completed his MFA at Columbia College in 2004 and has exhibited widely (recently at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and The Art Institute of Chicago). Brian is a frequent contributor to Adbusters Magazine.
Matt Siber completed his MFA at Columbia College in 2003 and has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

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Carol Golemboski’s series Psychometry concerns the pseudo-science of "object reading," a purported psychic ability to divine the history of objects through physical contact. Her manipulated black and white photographs expand upon age-old darkroom trickery, creating images where horror, history, and psychology occupy the same imaginative locale. Through an examination of fortune telling and the supernatural, she references Victorian spiritualism and its connection to nineteenth century photographs. Golemboski will discuss recent images in this series, many of which confront man's insatiable need to anticipate his own fate.

Carol Golemboski is an Assistant Professor of Photography at The University of Colorado at Denver. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation and Light Work. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections.

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A series of artist books, Brief Notes on Existence involves the gathering, documenting and cataloguing of dust clumps from both public and private environments. The understated imagery explores a dubious link between the traces of anthropological residue of daily life and the larger, ephemeral, meteorological events that transpire daily in the sky. Peter is intrigued by the possibility that there are traces of human life in a cumulus cloud and that humans might directly contribute to wind patterns, the shapes of clouds, barometric pressure and precipitation. In this project, furniture is moved, floors are swept, dust bunnies become ”clouds” and clarity eclipses ambiguity.

Peter HappelChristian lives in Tucson, AZ where he teaches at the University of Arizona and Pima Community College. He exhibits his work both locally and nationally and holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Photography from the University of Oregon.

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My imagemaker presentation addresses both the conventions and assumptions of museum practice and the photography of fine art as exemplified by my photographs and writings centered on the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (NY). My thesis is that both the art museum, and the medium of photography itself, arose at a similar time in history (the early 19th century) and both, in an almost conspiratorial way, have changed not only the way we look at and “use” art, but have also changed the nature of art itself.

Douglas Holleley is the author of Better Things (Clarellen, 2005). His previous book Digital Book Design and Publishing (Clarellen, 2001) is widely used as a photography text. Holleley holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, where he now teaches.

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The Death of the Heart is a collaborative work combining the photography of Sant Khalsa and poetry of B.H. Fairchild in an attempt to record, dramatize, and give aesthetic presence to the slow death of small rural towns throughout the contemporary Midwestern United States. B.H. Fairchild’s writings are informed by a lifetime of experience growing up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma and southwest Kansas. For their collaboration, Sant Khalsa journeyed through West Kansas photographing declining farm towns and the sparse yet rich remains of these communities and the surrounding landscapes. Sant Khalsa will present their project and discuss their collaborative experience and creative process.

Sant Khalsa has received awards form the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, California Council for the Humanities, and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. Her photo works are internationally exhibited, published and collected. She is chair and professor of art at California State University, San Bernardino.
B.H. Fairchild is a preeminent poet and recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award, William Carlos Williams Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Arthur Rense Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Guggenheim, Rockefeller/Bellagio and NEA Fellowships.

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Blood Work is a video art project that deals with Liou’s daughter’s leukemia. It comprises a series of video installations utilizing the latest imaging technology. The video depicts hundreds and of thousands of cell-like creatures that are rendered digitally from the young patient’s body. It shows the struggle she has to face when treated with chemotherapy. The High-Definition definition imagery loosely suggests a microscopic view inside the body, which allows a detailed experience for the viewer. The world in Blood Work is heavily tied with the cycles between illness and regeneration. It blends the scientific information with the parents’ emotion to shapes the viewer’s perception of the experience.

Arthur Liou worked as a journalist in Taiwan before coming to US the United Stated in the early ’ 90s. Over the past decade, his work has gravitates gravitated toward the increasingly personal issues of media experience, ethnicity, food, and illness. His work was exhibited internationally in New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Sweden, Brazil, and Argentina.

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Michael Marshall’s work resides in a narrative between the worlds of science and poetic personal experience. It is manifested as the colliding paradigms of faith and empiricism, an internalized conflict between logic and intuition. His images range from natural history museums and astronomy collections to found photographs and his own back yard. He is a photographer, not just in training, but in a scientific nature of collecting, a collector of images, a researcher in the magic and mystery of personal experience. He will be presenting his newest work in which he is constructing narratives through large multi-panel shadowbox constructions.

Michael Marshall is an exhibiting artist from Athens, Georgia. He has degrees in Physics as well as Studio Arts and completed his MFA in Photography at Arizona State University, 2000. He is currently on the faculty at the University of Georgia. His work is represented by the Krause Gallery in Atlanta.

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Alexander Mouton
& Christian Faur

Ethereal Landscapes is an interactive electronic installation conceived around the themes of life, death and the body, which can be experienced as an intimate physical book and simultaneously a projected video with sound. In presenting Ethereal Landscapes, Alexander and Christian will discuss their collaborative working process, their concept, experiences with multimedia art technologies, and their decision to interface video, sound and a photographic artist’s book. The presentation will include a slide lecture, a ten-minute video, and the opportunity for audience members to interact with the work.

Alexander Mouton's artistic interests lie in the poetic and narrative possibilities of sequencing images. His artists' books are in collections internationally. Alexander extends his work through time and sound based projects creating net art, interactive video installations, and live multimedia performances. Alexander is Assistant Professor of art at Denison University.
Christian Faur’s primary medium is oil on canvas and encaustic on wood, where he layers images of the human form with texts and numeric patterns. His involvement with digital technologies has led him to work with photography, video, computer programming and robotics. Christian is Digital Media Technologist at Denison University.

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As an emerging artist working with photographs in the 21st Century, I have chosen to focus on the (im)materiality of photography in order to take a close look at how images reveal themselves to us as viewers. In doing so, I have been able to reinterpret and at times remove entirely the framework in which we normally encounter photographs.

Susana Reisman was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1977. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Wellesley College and her Master’s of Fine Arts in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is currently teaching.

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As collaborative artists, we actively explore the sameness and difference within the construct of identity, and the role and meaning of signifiers. We continually work with self-portraiture and identity issues within various sociological contexts, engaged in the process of photography as performance. We are particularly interested in the doubling of the self and the performance inherent in identity construction. There are titles and classifications that make us “same/different”: sex, age, ethnicity, religion, background, social class, subculture, education, profession, taste, style. Beyond our individuality, we investigate the role and identity of the artist, and that of photography, within the sociocultural context.

Wilka Roig is an artist and educator based in Ithaca, NY. She was awarded the 2003 Light Work Grant and received her MFA in Photography from Cornell University. A Puerto Rican overseas, she explores issues of identity, performance, and the physical, emotional and psychological space in which these issues develop.
Tarrah Krajnak, born in Lima, Peru, is currently a Visiting Professor at University of Notre Dame. She received her MFA in 2004 and her current projects include video performances that examine the role of signifiers in the creation of identity and digital constructions addressing memory and familial history.

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Among practitioners of digital and analog media there has been, of late, a resurgent interest in excavating and revaluating 19th century imaging technologies. This sentiment seems to emerge from the realization that important changes we’re experiencing now - how we fix images and how we look at them - are a reflection of a greater upheaval that occurred a mere hundred and fifty years ago. In the spirit of reconsidering technologies that have been left by the wayside, we will provide a real time mediated performance using little more than a clear light bulb and a few props.

Melanie Walker and George Peters have been collaborating on various public art projects, theater performances, shadow shows, gallery exhibitions and international kite performances since 1996. Their combined works span a wide range of disciplines including installation sculpture projects, animation, environmental sculpture, aerial sculpture and historic photographic processes.

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I will discuss the evolution of my series of portraits of Vietnam veterans with stories excerpted from videotape interviews. I traveled across the US finding individuals with important stories. This project focuses on the effects of war on individuals with the passage of time. As a nation currently engaged in an unpopular and protracted war, we can find parallels with the situation in Iraq today—it is not coincidental that many of the veterans bring up Iraq with sadness and dread. The completed work premiered in October 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and will travel to other museums.

Jeffrey A. Wolin is Halls Professor of Photography at Indiana University. His portraits of Holocaust survivors, Written in Memory, was published by Chronicle Books, accompanying solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and ICP. Wolin is the recipient of two NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.

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A New Photographic Space

This talk explores the notion that 'something' is happening to photography. Some contemporary commentators describe this something as 'post-photography', the 'end' or 'death of photography' and is entirely due to computers and the software that have increasingly dominated photographic industries. These arguments are often linked to new apocalyptic or avant-garde attitudes to social transformation through technologically determined innovation. I reject this account of the 'new technologies' of visualization. Instead, I will elaborate on my argument that there is a subtler change, which might be characterised by the distinction between 'photography' and the 'photographic'.

Lecture: David Bate
When: Wednesday, March 22 at 5pm
Where: MoCP, 600 S. Michigan, Free and open to the public
Exhibiting artist David Bate will discuss his series Zone based on Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. Both the film and Bate’s photographs were made in Tallinn, Estonia, situated on the former Soviet Union’s East/West border and now the site of rapid social and economic change. Bate has a PhD in Fine Art from the University at Leeds and frequently writes for Source magazine.

David Bate is Course Director of the MA Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster, London, England. His photographic artworks are widely exhibited in Europe and he has written several key essays on photography. His first book Photography and Surrealism was published by IBTaurus (London & New York (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2004.

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This paper explores the changing nature of the function and circulation of the image. The transformation of technical imaging practices from analogue towards digitisation has enabled images to flow, in different and more fluid forms. These new cultural uses of images provide a burden for the image in the public domain as much as it compels a re negotiation of cultural identity. As new technological relations give rise to current social configurations, what types of experiences are being maintained and what forms of experience are being altered? To assess the significance of these new image technologies is also to examine how images are used, by whom and for what purpose. What are the social spaces, in which the context of the image is now being distributed, read and received?

Jane Button is a PhD candidate at the Australian Centre and Media and Communications Departments at the University of Melbourne. She is a tutor for the Australian Centre and Post Graduate student co-ordinator. In 2004 she managed the LEICA/CCP Documentary Photography award, around the regional galleries of Melbourne, for Victoria’s premier contemporary photo based art space: the Centre for Contemporary Photography. Prior to this she has worked in the New Zealand contemporary art scene.

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This paper looks at the early reception of photography in France as a means of understanding how its classification, including its assimilation into the existing aesthetic system, resulted in muting some of the medium’s intrinsic and most provocative aspects. The universal exhibitions, in particular that of 1855, helped to reduce the plurality of early photographic practice by restricting the categories of objects to two: “art” and “industry”. At the same time, the exhibitions mounted by the Société Française de Photographie privileged the concept of photographs as pictures, effectively marginalizing a central mode of experiencing them, that of “reading”.

Margaret Fields Denton, Associate Professor of Art History and Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Richmond, Virginia; Florence Gould Fellow, Princeton University (1999-2000); author of “Francis Wey and the Discourse of Photography as Art in France in the early 1850s (Art History, 2002).

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The computer is a chameleon engine with the capacity to physicalize almost any metaphor that is attached to its animating force. This presentation will open by considering the digital exploitation of photography’s metaphors. Human-subjects researchers are considering the validity of non-verbal ways of knowing as they begin to embrace arts-based and image-based research methods. This presentation will argue that the discourse and metaphors grown out of the criticism, history and practice of photography contains the language, skills and vision that qualitative researchers need to learn in order to know the rigour of image-based research.

Michael Emme, an Associate Professor from the University of Alberta, has exhibited and published across North America. He has taught, studio, history, research and art education courses in Alberta, Washington State, Nova Scotia and British Columbia. He edits the Canadian Art Teacher and edited The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education.

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Carol Flax’s investigations of our relationship to history and memory dynamically combine both traditional photography and innovative approaches to lens-based technology. Ms Flax will discuss her work in the context of her experiences in the photography department at the University of Arizona, where her interdisciplinary approach to the medium was met with a resistance that resulted in a loosing battle for tenure. Concerned with the institutional responses to evolving definitions of contemporary photographic practice, she will share personal insight about this experience as a means of addressing its broader conceptual, theoretical, and political implications.

Carol Flax has exhibited work at the XXV Bienal de São Paulo, the George Eastman House, LACMA and ICP. Her work has been published internationally and is in the collections of the CCP and the Seattle Art Museum among others. Her explorations of evolving technologies have been supported by numerous grants and by pioneering institutions such as Institute for Studies in the Arts and Banff New Media Institute.

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If Chicago's 1893 Exposition "invented illusion," none other than Daguerre created the "ne plus ultra of pictorial illusion" years earlier. Daguerre's Parisian Diorama opened in 1822. There Daguerre exhibited his illusionistic, 14 x 22 meter paintings. Comparing these to digital photography, our "new pluralism" appears not entirely new. Paralleling the SPE 2005 announcement, the Diorama dismantled "barriers" between media (especially painting and theatre), "cross-pollinated" with cinema (before it was officially invented), and worked "beneath the surface of the image in virtual and malleable" spaces (via both sides of the thin canvas). As one reviewer stated, the Diorama "could not fail to enlarge the boundaries of art."

Andrew Hershberger, Bowling Green State University (http://personal.bgsu.edu/~aehersh), received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2001. He presented a paper on Jay Dusard and the Border Art Workshop at SPE 2004 in Rhode Island. A frequent contributor to History of Photography, his book on Minor White's photographic sequences is forthcoming.

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The successful charting of human and other species’ genomes and the subsequent growth of bioengineering has greatly altered our sense of human development and identity and the integrity of individual species and has raised significant environmental, medical and ethical concerns. This paper will present an overview of contemporary photographers whose work reflects the world brought about by genetic research and development. Scientists’ need to create accurate visual records of their investigations places photography in an ideal position to examine this new terrain. Contemporary photographers have responded to these issues individually and collaboratively with constituencies including scientists, engineers and other artists.

April Katz earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 1988. She’s an associate professor of printmaking at Iowa State University. Katz is currently president of the Southern Graphics Council. She has an extensive exhibition and grants record and was featured in Carol Pulin’s 2001 Contemporary Impressions article, “April Katz.”

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As Associate Dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I have spearheaded the development of new programs reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of our trans-mediated world. Convergence of media has created new forms of arts practice—demanding new pedagogical, critical and theoretical models. Photography has found itself in broader dialogue with other disciplines. This convergence and divergence demand new ways of delivering and receiving information, new attention to the processes of teaching and learning, and new approaches to interdisciplinary programs. This presentation will examine the history of those developments at SIUC from 1983.

Gary Kolb holds a BA in Religions and an MFA in Photography. He is currently associate dean and director of the New Media Center in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has been involved in the “digital migration” since 1983.

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It is frequently observed that photography now exists in a world saturated by information. This is not information in the sense of reports on the characteristics of things and events but, as Geoffrey Nunberg has described it, it is information as a new kind of abstract, generic, and intentional substance that is ‘at large’ in the world. In this paper I bring together examples of recent photographic practice, critical writing on photography, and a discourse that is normally remote from photography: ‘informatics’, in an attempt to understand the possible re-mediation of photography in the ‘information age’.

Martin Lister is Professor of Visual Culture in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. He has published widely on the cultural significance of digital photography, on new media and media history.

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This presentation by Corinne Rose, Manager of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Columbia College Chicago will highlight the museum’s outreach programs, which engage urban teens in using photography to examine and explore their lives and communities. Taught by graduate students and adjunct faculty from Columbia College paired with classroom teachers, students learn analogue and digital photography skills, work with writers to expand their work through the inclusion of text, view master works and work with artists drawn from the museum’s collections and exhibitions, and show their work in an annual museum youth exhibition.

As she pursued her MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Corinne Rose created youth photography programs for a variety of non-profit organizations. In her current capacity as the manager of education at the Museum of Contemporary Columbia College Chicago, Rose founded and manages a variety of photography outreach programs in Chicago high schools.

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An artist’s self-promotion tools are the most important extension of their print portfolio. It is essential that your marketing tools be well thought through before investing your time and money in design and production. Your graphic identity and business intentions should be clearly articulated to the end viewer, whether the promotional pieces be in presented in print, CD-ROM or website format. In short, you should be prepared to deliver your marketing tools in all of these formats to serve the needs of diverse audiences, with clarity of business intent. MVS will discuss these and related issues in this presentation.

Mary Virginia Swanson is a leader in the fields of marketing and licensing fine art photography. She is a consultant to photographers, and frequently lectures and conducts workshops on marketing for artists. She is the author of Marketing Guidebook for Photographers; her website URL is www.mvswanson.com.

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This paper suggests that current photographic practice reflects an ‘elimination of barriers’ and conventions that traditionally define disciplines; that visual practice presents a discursive reflection of the contemporary condition, an interpretation that parallels, if not anticipates, written debate – a ‘cross pollination’ of visual practices and philosophies. It considers the literal and the non-literal in photographic presentations, and the assumption of, for example, ‘literary’ strategies that investigate possibilities of ‘realism’ that use parallel discourse. With reference to theories which forefront a conceptual framework, this paper considers how photography incorporates different principles of expression and traverses conceptual domains.

Jane Tormey lectures in Critical & Historical Studies at Loughborough University School of Art & Design, UK. She co-edits the electronic journal Tracey – Contemporary Drawing and has work published in Masquerade: Women’s Contemporary Portrait Photography (Fotogallery 2003), The State of the Real (I.B. Tauris 2005), IJADE and Afterimage.

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Between 1992-1998, Rineke Dijkstra made an arresting portrait series of adolescents on beaches in the United States and Europe. Acknowledging precedents in August Sander and Diane Arbus, Dijsktra, working in a realist style, invites an intensive scrutiny of her subjects while refusing them a fixed identity. Are her photographs better framed as typologies, or individual portraits? How do considerations of age, class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality impact such categorizations and the slippages that inevitably occur? This presentation explores Dijkstra’s project as a direct response to tenuous notions of contemporary adolescence and identity, in an effort to open discussions of photography’s “new” pluralism and its continued relevance for portraiture.

April M. Watson is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. She has worked as a research and curatorial assistant at The National Gallery of Art and the Center for Creative Photography, and has written independently for numerous publications, including the recent monograph, The Art of Frederick Sommer.

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Photographs record our environment and, since the mid-nineteenth century, have been used to chart places, human occupation and transportation systems. This role is founded on realist principles, on the credibility of the image. This presentation investigates contemporary topographic (landscape) practices in relation to the much heralded ‘loss of the real’. It is suggested that the credibility of the investigative landscape image persists and - despite the affects of the digital - topographic vision retains interest and integrity whilst, in recent years, acquiring enhanced critical edge.

Liz Wells: curator, Facing East, contemporary landscape photography from Baltic Areas (tour, 2004 -2006). Publications as author/editor/co-editor include Surface (2005); Photography: A Critical Introduction (2004, 3rd ed.); The Photography Reader (2003); Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now (2000); Director, Land/Water and the Visual Arts Research Group, University of Plymouth, U.K.

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What do we say when we talk about photographs? Podcasting is a new form of broadcasting on the Internet. Many amateur broadcasters have created shows on a variety of topics (wine, movies, fishing, biking). Podcasts are relatively easy to create. All one needs is a microphone, a recorder, and access to the Internet. How are photographers using podcasting to contextualize their photographs? How are podcasts being used to discuss photography? This presentation investigates current photography podcasts and the opportunities for more.

Todd Wemmer is the Assistant Professor of Communication at Endicott College. I teach courses in journalism and autobiographical media. My doctoral research at UMASS, Amherst, investigates new technologies influence on the social uses of photography. I'm currently working on a DVD project titled, Where will your photos go when you die?, that examines lost and found photos.

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Scanner As Camera

In the current digital age, what defines an image as photography, and what is a camera? Since its inception, the medium of photography has been built upon embracing technological advancement and change. Despite this, there often seems to be a separation defined between “pure” photography and digitally created imagery. In this ever-changing medium, where does the flatbed scanner fall as an imagemaking tool, and what is being done with it by contemporary artist-photographers? This panel will include presentations of work by four awardwinning artists, all of whom are working with the flatbed scanner as a camera.

Ruth Adams is an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Art at the University of Kentucky. She holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Miami, a BFA in Photography from RIT, and a BS in Computer Science from Syracuse University. Her widely exhibited images have won awards and been featured in Camera Arts Magazine.
Christa Kreeger Bowden holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Georgia and a BA in Photography and film communication from Tulane University. She most recently served as assistant professor of photography at Southampton College of Long Island University, and was a 2005 nominee for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography.
Darryl Curran earned an MA, Photography and Design (1964) and BA, Art (1960) from UCLA. He is professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, where he served as chair of the Department of Art from 1989-1999. He was SPE’s Honored Educator in 1996.
Maggie Taylor is a digital artist who received her BA in philosophy from Yale University and her MFA in photography from the University of Florida. In 2005 Peachpit Press published a book on her work entitled "Maggie Taylor's Landscape of Dreams."

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Now that digital technologies are integrated into the practice, photography has become electronic and screen based. Many photographers are working with both still and moving imagery. Still cameras have video, and video cameras make stills. This hybrid technology is breeding hybrid practices. This panel will present the work of three artists who use digital video to make work. Each artist will present his own work.

Michael Ensdorf teaches photography at Roosevelt University in Chicago. His work was included in the exhibitions Iterations at ICP in New York, and Photography after Photography, which toured museums in Europe and the United States. He received his MFA in photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Stephen Komp teaches photography and video art at the State University of New York at Fredonia, New York. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in photojournalism from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a MFA in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Vagner Whitehead teaches photography and video art at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, abroad, and online, in solo and group exhibitions, as well as in video and film festivals. He received a BFA degree (photography) from The Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA in creative photography and electronic intermedia from the University of Florida.
Barry Anderson is unable to attend. While his work will still be presented, Vagner Whitehead is replacing him on this panel.

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The increasingly complex role of research in artistic and pedagogical practices means that we are not simply "photographers" anymore. Institutional interest in interdisciplinary and technological collaborations has encouraged artists to develop research paradigms similar to models in the sciences and humanities. How are Canadian artist-teachers responding to interest in the plurality of our practices and how are institutions engaging with these practices? Panelists will address their current research, institutional support (or lack thereof), artistic practice as a viable form of research, relationships of research to pedagogical interests. Panelist's practices include landscape, women and espionage, the culture of obsolescence and the relationships between research, documentation and art.

Nina Levitt is an artist working in photography, video and interactive technologies. She has exhibited across Canada and in the US and the UK, and her work has been widely published. She is assistant professor of visual arts at York University, Toronto where she teaches photography and installation.
Katherine Knight is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at York University, Toronto. She teaches and carries out research related to still and moving images, landscape and cognition. Knight received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography in 2000. She has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows.
Vid Ingelevics is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art & Design, Toronto. He teaches in the areas of Photography, Criticism and Curatorial Practice and in Design. His writing, curatorial projects and artwork have been published and exhibited extensively across Canada and in Europe.
Robert Bean is an Associate Professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University). Bean was the Division Chair of Media Arts at NSCADU from 1999 to 2003. Bean has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe, South America and New Zealand. He has published articles and essays on art, photography, aurality and popular culture.

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This panel, comprised of photographers, historians and archivists, will talk about the El Llano Estacado: A Cultural and Geographical Island in the Sky photography project. The methodology that informs this project is an interdisciplinary examination of how history, culture and geography has shaped, and continues to shape, the Llano. We will discuss the tactics employed to foster interaction among the photographers and the region’s “local experts”, and how such interactions influenced the photographic work. We will also speak about the challenges and future of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Rick Dingus is Professor of Photography at Texas Tech University. An author and photographer, he has worked on many projects funded by NEA, Polaroid Corp, Art Matters, Inc., and the Arizona Commission on the Arts (Rephotographic Survey Project, Marks In Place). His work reflects an ongoing exploration of the “landscape” as not limited to traditional subjects and “documentary” as not limited to straight photography.
Andrew John Liccardo is an Assistant Professor of photography at Northern Illinois University. He is a 2002 Fellow of The Photography Institute. He recently received a Formby Fellowship at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library to conduct research in their photographic holdings.
William E. Tydeman, Ph.D. is Associate Dean of Libraries and Director of The Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University. He is the co-editor of Reading into Photography: Selected Essays, 1959-1980. Tydeman studied the history of photography at the University of New Mexico under the late Beaumont Newhall.
An Española native, Miguel Gandert has been photographing the social rituals, people and landscapes of his native New Mexico for over 20 years. Gandert has exhibited in some of the nation's leading museums including the National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is currently an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Deborah Luster is the recipient of the 2000 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize (with poet C.D. Wright). Her work has been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the L. A. County Museum of Art, and the National Archives, among others. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, was selected by The New York Times and the Village Voice as one of 2003’s best photography books.

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This presentation addresses digital imaging in visual culture and what this change means for the field of photographic education. At Rochester Institute of Technology, the relationship of the digital to the photographic has led to a profound reconfiguration of photographic practice, from curriculum to classroom, studio to media facilities. At issue beyond practice is the study of digital aesthetics, the formative vocabulary and visual language of this new realm of image making. In this discussion, the union of digital practices and aesthetics provides the instructional backdrop for a new understanding of the future role of photographic education in our decidedly post-photographic digital culture.

Therese Mulligan is Professor and Coordinator of the MFA in Imaging Arts in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology as well as director of the School’s Gallery.
A professor in the School of Print Media at RIT, Patti Russotti is an artist, curriculum developer, and international presenter in all aspects of digital imaging and related technologies.
Greg Barnett is director of operations for the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at RIT and is an expert in digital and photographic workflow with over 30 years of experience.

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This panel will present an overview of current ideas and trends in photographic education, The panel will address the emergence of digital technology as an innovative teaching methodology and speak about web lesson plans, the posting of assignments, readings and conferencing as realities and responsibilities for institutions. We will explain ways in which traditional silver methods can still enhance the student’s critical awareness of process and completion and look at solutions for teaching more information with the same term requirements and budgets. This panel will discuss how it will require original solution to teach and grow in this new and demanding environment.

Dennis Keeley has been a photographer, teacher and writer for more than 20 years. He has won many awards for his book of photographs “Looking for a City in America.” Currently, he is the chair of the Photography and Imaging Department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Ed Meyers is an industry veteran with over 20 year in the photography field. He designed one of the first all-digital high-volume studios in the Midwest. Ed joined Calumet as a technical instructor in 1998. He currently serves in that capacity, as well as working as consultant, writer, and technically savvy problem solver.
Richard Newman has been a photographer and printer for more than twenty-five years. For the past 14 years he has worked for Calumet Photographic as the National Education Coordinator. He has published 3 books on photography and been a contributor to two others. He has been chairing this discussion for SPE for the past 3 years at both National and Regional conferences.

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Internationally recognized artists Robin Lasser, Melanie Pullen and Erin V. Sotak, along with emerging artists Morgan Konn and Adrienne Pao examine the allure of being desired. Moderated by writer and critic, Dore Bowen, this panel is comprised of female artists of varying ages and perspectives. By employing, or denying, tropes of the fashion industry they address the pervasive, fetishistic or restrictive aspects of fashion. These artists all make photographs but also incorporate contemporary art practices and tools such as performance, installation, digital technology and clothing design. All of their work pushes the relationship between fine art photography and its more popularized, and subversive, sibling; fashion photography.

Dore Bowen (moderator) is a critical theorist and curator whose projects concern the phenomenology of perception within the interstices of the temporal and visual arts. Her criticism has appeared in journals and catalogues worldwide. She is currently Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at San Jose State University.
Morgan Konn is an MFA candidate at San Jose State University. Her self portraits are a record of private performances in domestic spaces. She employs digital and traditional tools to exaggerate, deform and reorganize multiple images into a single image. Her work has been exhibited nationally and in China.
Robin Lasser is a Professor of Art at San Jose State University. Lasser produces photographs, video, site-specific installations and public art dealing with socially significant themes. Lasser often works in a collaborative mode with other artists, writers, students, public agencies, community organizations, and international coalitions to produce art and promote public dialogue.
Adrienne Pao recently graduated with her MFA in Photography from San Jose State University. She is currently working on a series of Hawaiian Cover-ups and the collaborative series, Dress Tents, both projects investigating notions of tourism and travel in fantasy landscapes. Pao is adjunct faculty at Modesto Junior College.
Melanie Pullen is a self-taught photographer. She recently published her series High Fashion Crime Scenes. Pullen’s been spotlighted in the New York Times Magazine, ELLE, Nylon, Vogue, etc. and her work is in museums worldwide. She shoots regularly for magazines like Flaunt and Rolling Stone. Melanie currently lives in Los Angeles.
Erin V. Sotak is a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. She received an MFA from San Jose State University. Her work has been exhibited internationally including the Phoenix Art Museum, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art and Centro de Artes a La Universidad Eafit, Bogotá, Colombia.

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This panel presents the work of four artists, whose work and teaching utilizes new media and traditional photography. The panelists’ work ranges from multimedia, audio and video, installations, digital imaging, and still photography. The panel will discuss the connections between new media and photography, and share how their studio practice influences their teaching while negotiating among the studio, the classroom and the gallery. Kristen Hileman, Assistant Curator, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC will moderate and offer additional insights from another important perspective, the museum.

Kristen Hileman is Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Hileman is working on the Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective opening in Washington in February and coordinating an outdoor performance by Oliver Herring for April. She has recently organized projects by Jim Hodges and Cai Guo-Qiang for the Hirshhorn. Her spring seminar at GWU focuses on interactivity and performance.
Roberto Bocci is a multimedia electronic artist born in Italy.
Over the past twenty years his work has evolved from painting through photography to computer-driven interactive installations. His artistic concerns encompass multiple points of view and questions of personal and social identity. Roberto's work includes multimedia installations, photographs and CD-ROMs.
Dean Kessmann received an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University in 1996. He has exhibited his work throughout the U.S. and has taught photography at a number of institutions. Presently, Kessmann is assistant professor of photography at The George Washington University. Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, currently represents his work.
John Pickel received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1986. He was visiting assistant professor at Herron School of Art/IUPUI from 1986-89 and visiting assistant professor at NC State University from 1993-1997. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Wake Forest University. John exhibits installations throughout the U.S.
E. Brady Robinson, M.F.A. Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1996. Installation, digital and photography work has been exhibited nationally including, Aspen Art Museum, Florida State Art Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art. Currently is Assistant Professor of Art in the MFA in Studio Art and Computer Graduate Department at University of Central Florida, Orlando.

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The Photography Department of Columbia College Chicago and The Center for American Places have created a unique publishing partnership resulting in a series of significant photographic monographs and compilations. This panel presents essential elements of this publishing partnership presented by its working principals: Bob Thall, Guggenheim Fellow and Chair of the Photography Department; George Thompson, President of The Center for American Places; Ben Gest, digital pre-press; Andrew Borowiec, Professor of Art, Chair, Imaging Division, Myers School of Art, the University of Akron and Justin Kimball, Guggenheim Fellow, whose monograph is one of the partnership’s most recent publications. Topics include selection, sequencing and design, in-house digital pre-press, raising money, and distribution. Moderated by Tom Shirley.

Tom Shirley received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Digital Imaging Curriculum Coordinator at Columbia College Chicago and has curated exhibitions and participated on panels focusing on digital imaging issues. His work is in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Bob Thall received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is Chair of the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. He has published four books of photographs: The Perfect City , The New American Village, City Spaces and most recently, At City’s Edge. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.
George F. Thompson is President of the Center for American Places and the author/editor of five books. Of the more than 200 books he has brought to publication, nearly a third have won publishing prizes and awards, including the Best Book of Non-Fiction published in the US and top book honors in 27 academic fields.
Ben Gest received his MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He has exhibited nationally and is in collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The LaSalle Bank Photography Collection and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gest is an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Andrew Borowiec has an MFA from the Yale University School of Art. He has taught at the University of Akron's Myers School of Art since 1984. His books include Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (Columbia College Chicago/Center for American Places, 2005) and Along the Ohio (Johns Hopkins, 2000). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.
Justin Kimball received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and is an Assistant Professor at Amherst College. He has had numerous exhibitions and publications including DoubleTake Magazine, Spirit of Family and his recent monograph, Where We Find Ourselves. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003.

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The work of these artists represents a thread of contemporary photography in which images are formulated in the space between fact and fiction. A balance is created between precision and vagueness, abstraction and literalness. What is implied and what is to be discovered is of primary importance.
As a result, the photographs act as a center of activity rather than a fixed surface—encouraging the viewer to project their own personal, psychological and imaginative responses onto the images. It is the drama of the shared photographic moment that then becomes the subject—the point at which object, author and viewer perform.

Caroline Burghardt’s photographs investigate adornment and socialization as reflections of cultural constructs and constraints. She examines interior spaces (mental and physical) as the loci of sociological identity, psychology and personal history. She received a BFA from Bard College and an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art.
Lyssa Palu-ay is currently an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art. Her work consists of black white photographs of organic and inorganic forms abstracted to feel simultaneously microscopic and macroscopic. She is also an artist in residence at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City.
Adam Lampton currently teaches photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Emerson College in Boston. He received his MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art.
Rebecca Sittler is an Assistant Professor of Art at University of Central Florida in Orlando. Her photographs use elements of performance and conceptual art alongside visual sensibilities borrowed from the history of still life painting and the aesthetics of her Mid-western upbringing. She was recently awarded a 2006 Florida Artist Fellowship.

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It's Blurry, Isn't That Art?

Although we are all acquainted with photography’s ability to freeze or preserve time, I find myself further stimulated by the medium’s ability to compress time and space and in the cyclical nature in which both photography and our modes of perception sculpt and instruct each other. My work is concerned with the visceral representation of experience as manifested by a photographic image. The ability to disconnect the image from its reference to a specific instant has always intrigued me and I see this as a fertile ground for expanding the future of photographic practice.

Beau Comeaux will complete his MFA at the University of North Texas in May 2006. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where he received his BFA in Studio Art from Louisiana State University and continues to photograph and explore the world with childlike abandon.

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The photographic image has the power to expose previously unknown cultural and psychological phenomena. As art combines with these phenomena, photographs can create an invaluable dialog about how we live our lives and why. The series Auto Obscura uses the dialectic between photography and social reportage to generate discussion about America’s ubiquitous car culture. In these images, I turn my 1995 Ford Contour into a camera obscura and photograph the urban and natural landscape within the confines of the car. The inversion of the exterior world allowed by the use of camera obscura speaks to the loss of grounding, the sense of disorientation and dislocation, created by life experienced in the car. As the director of these images, I place artifacts from life outside the car into the interior to suggest narratives that transcend the isolation and dead air of the automobile.

Mary Goodwin has a BA in German Literature from Mount Holyoke, South Hadley, Massachusetts, and a BFA in photography from Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. She currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is studying for her MFA at the University of New Mexico.

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Jyl Kelley’s stage takes the shape of one of more circles, or arrangements with the inner arena created by 33 pinhole cameras arranged on tripods and connected by electric wiring. This camera arrangement becomes part of a new landscape in the imagery it produces of itself. Animated video loops are constructed from scanning the camera’s negatives and then projected as short movies. Digital photographs are displayed to give viewers a close-up of individual frames from the animated sequence. Kelley’s lecture consists of a discussion and display of some of her most recent video animations.

Jyl Kelley practices imitative magic and photography. She is currently a Masters of Fine Art candidate at the University of New Mexico, expected to graduate in 2006. Most recently she has exhibited video animations of pinhole photographs in Istanbul Turkey, New Zealand and New Mexico.

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Do manipulations and multiple media destroy the integrity of photography? I don't have time to wonder. Without digital, printmaking, and painting applications, my work would be impossible. Media plurality provides a "realistic" approach to difficult material. Alternative photography’s unpredictability parallels one's lack of control in life while digital, printmaking, and painting techniques offer a chance to control imagery. In addition, if