Keynote Speaker, The Promiscuity of Photography

THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 2007, 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Trinity Cathedral
Sponsored by Sprint Systems of Photography

Introduction by Rebecca Cummins, University of Washington, Conference Chair

Photography is the only artistic medium that also exists in the world at large.  In fact, it is ubiquitous in our culture, manifest in myriad formats from advertising to medical imaging to jpegs published on Match.com.  How, then, does one distinguish between the photographic imagery available at every turn and that deemed to be “art?”  Is it through the simple distinction—conceptualized by Marcel Duchamp—that something is an aesthetic object because an artist claims that to be the case? Certainly, the art world’s long-standing practice of editioning photographs, along with its usually complex pricing system, sets fine-art photography apart from what one encounters in a daily newspaper, but are there other, less tangible modes of difference?  Artists like Richard Prince, who has appropriated Marlboro ads and biker magazine images, makes the argument that this is indeed the case.

Nancy Spector is Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she has organized exhibitions on conceptual photography, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle.  She co-organized Moving Pictures and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). She was one of the curators of Monument to Now, an exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection, which premiered in Athens as part of the Olympics program. She was Adjunct Curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennial in 1998. Under the auspices of the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, she has initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner. She has contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal, and Anna Gaskell. She is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award. Spector is currently organizing a retrospective of Richard Prince’s work and a group exhibition entitled theanyspacewhatsoever for the Guggenheim. She is also the American Commissioner for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Photo courtesy of Lina Bertucci

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 5:30 - 7:00 pm, Trinity Cathedral
Sponsored by Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida – Photography Program, and Eastman Kodak Company

Introduction by Richard Gray, University of Notre Dame, Chair of the Board

The Honored Educator will explore contemporary photographic practice in Mexico and its origins, with additional reference to recent conferences in Cuba. The strongest long-term tradition in Mexico has been social documentary and journalism, with some brief incursions from European Surrealism and American Pictorialism. This practice is still strong, but is being joined by more fictional and conceptually based work in an attempt to more effectively join the contemporary world photography community. Exhibits are increasingly coming out of Mexico, and Mexican artists have gained recognition abroad recently largely due to the wide distribution of films such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and Amores Perros, and Pedro Meyer’s popular website ZoneZero. Mexican artists using photography are beginning to effectively challenge both foreign and home-grown expectations of national and ethnic authenticity.  

Rod Slemmons is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and instructor of the history of photography at Columbia College Chicago (since 2002. He did his graduate work at R.I.T. and was intern employee at George Eastman House from 1976-78. From 1982-96, he was the Curator of Prints and Photographs, Seattle Art Museum. He taught at the University of Washington, Seattle (1996-2002) and Western Washington University (1969-1975). He has organized numerous exhibitions including Like a One-Eyed Cat – Lee Friedlander’s first retrospective with a major catalog by Abrams (1989); Persistence of Vision – a retrospective of the digital work of Paul Berger (2003) and Witness: Contemporary Mexican Journalism (2004). Rod has authored several books on photography and his essays have appeared in dozens of publications including Afterimage, Black Flash, image, and Reflex. He was National Chair of SPE from 1990-1994.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 5:30 - 7:00 pm, Trinity Cathedral
Sponsored by Calumet Photographic

Introduction by Silvia Lizama, Barry University, Conference Committee - Chair of Local Committee

I will speak about three interconnected projects:
Vietnam (1994-1998) are photographs made when I return to Vietnam for the first time since my family and I were evacuated to the United States in 1975 at the end of the war.  In Small Wars (1999-2002), I worked with a small community with Vietnam War re-enactors and 29 Palms (2003-2005) involves US Marines training in the California desert.  This trilogy presents a layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of war.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960, An-My Lê came to the U.S. as a political refugee at age 15. In 1994, she returned to create an evocative large-format photographic series that represented her attempt to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape.  In1999, Lê began an exploration of war imagery by working with Vietnam War re-enactors in North Carolina who restage battles as well as the training and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and American GIs. Most recently, Lê has photographed U.S. military training exercises for Iraq and Afghanistan in the American desert. The three series were recently published by Aperture (2005) in Small Wars: An-my Le.

An-My Lê (MFA Yale) is a recipient of the John Gutmann Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Solo shows include Murray Guy, NY; Dia, Beacon; Marion Center, Santa Fe; MOCP, Chicago and RISD Museum. Group shows include the 2006 Taipei Biennial; The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video; New Landscape, MOMA, NY; and Set Up: Recent Acquisitions in Photography at the Whitney Museum of Art, NY.  Upcoming 2007 shows include San Francisco MOMA and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Concerto A

Our theaters of the artificial have generated phantasmatic experiences straining to induce sensations of affinity with our omnivorous ‘realities.’  And like our theatres, so our images, images burdened with mute implications and too often subsumed in empty nostalgias or blank reverie.  Particularly true for photography, we have invested so profoundly in the exact optical trace, in its unswerving accuracy, in its desolate presence.  So deeply has the relationship to the ‘photographic’ (a kind of epistemological plateau) ingrained itself in the imaginary that even ‘virtual’ worlds readily substitute themselves – if fleetingly – for existing ones.  Untethered from history, unfettered by the forces of physics, liberated from any banal correspondence to actuality, freed from material consequence, this is a realm of symptomatic satisfaction and special effects, a realm of little, or no, material consequence, little, or no, human pathos.  While these fragile illusions are extraordinary, they remind us that the imaginary is a special condition, one in which we can jettison the clumsy obstacles of the world ‘as-is’ in favor of the world ‘as-if’ (the phony ones which haunts virtual reality).  Wildly oscillating between credulity and incredulity, ‘real’ and rendered, our representations no longer endure as signifiers but as ciphers.

As we continually hunt for the ‘real’ (and its history), reality insistently becomes a variable with the image as one of its momentary states.  In this sense our task is to reconsider representation as itself an unfinished project, one in which the progressive ‘retreat’ from the presumptive link between an image and a real will continue to dissolve into an epistemological discourse.  This approach can only be sustained by resolute – and unrepentant –deconstruction of imaged realities whose conditions are hopelessly confined with the now collapsed assumption that what we see is merely the effect of a cause, rather than its opposite.  In the contemporary terms we must refigure the notion of representation as itself an interface into realities only possible as images…

Timothy Druckrey is Director of the Graduate Photography and Digital Imaging program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. He also works as a curator, writer, and editor living in New York City. He lectures internationally about the social impact of electronic media, the transformation of representation, and communication in interactive and networked environments. He co-organized the international symposium Ideologies of Technology at the Dia Center of the Arts and co-edited the book Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Bay Press). He also co-curated the exhibition Iterations: The New Image at the International Center of Photographyand edited the book by the same name published by MIT Press. He edited Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation and is Series Editor for Electronic Culture: History, Theory, Practice  published by MIT Press. These books now include Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, net_condition: art and global media (with Peter Weibel), Geert Lovink’s, Dark Fiber, and Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel), Stelarc: The Monograph (edited by Marquard Smith), Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Siegfried Zielinski). Recent exhibitions he has curated include Bits and Pieces, Critical Conditions and co-curated New Media Beijing (2006).  He has been Guest Professor at the University of Applied Art, Vienna (2004) and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford (2005). 

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SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto C

It was not until President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China that a new trade relationship was begun between the U.S. and China. The Chinese leadership moved away from central planning to a more regional and market-oriented economy and focused on foreign trade as a major vehicle for economic growth. The result has been that in a quarter of a century, China has transformed itself from an impoverished and closed agricultural society to a globally integrated industrial powerhouse. This lecture explores the dense layers of social messages received by the West, disseminated primarily through photographic media, both journalistic and artistic. By analyzing several recent photographic projects by outsiders and insiders, this lecture hopes to humanize the new china, and to put a face on the “Made in China” label.

Natasha Egan is Associate Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago where she has organized over a dozen international exhibitions.  Natasha is also a part-time photography instructor at Columbia College.  She holds an MA in museum studies, MFA in fine art photography, and a BA in Asian Studies.

Photo courtesy of Rod Slemmons

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SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2007                11:00 – 11:45 am             Concerto B

Tina Schelhorn is the founding director of Galerie Lichtblick, Cologne, which is celebrating its 20th year as a non-profit organization for contemporary photography that has presented over 150 exhibitions. She organized Int. Fotoszene Köln (1990-1996) and curated and organized the festival Int. Fototage Herten (1995-2001). In 2005, she curated and organized the festival Int. Fototage Mannheim/ Ludwigshafen and Contemporary American Photography. From 1996 - 2006 she was on the Board of Directors of the German Society of Photography and has been a freelance curator for Aufbruch—neue russische Fotografie; Ist die Photographie am Ende?, Halle; L.Fritz Gruber—homage to his 90th birthday; Tokyo Shock, Cologne; and Split View, Art Basel. Tina has been a portfolio reviewer and has exchanged exhibitions with several international festivals including Arles/France, Braga/Portugal, Houston/USA, Madrid/Spain, Noorderlicht/Netherlands, Odense/Denmark, Perpignan/France, Plovdiv/Bulgaria, Sao Paulo/Brazil, Lodz/Poland and Milano/Italy. She has published numerous books and catalogues and has written widely on photography. Her website and exhibition project: Images against war features more than 600 international photographers (www.imagesagainstwar.com).

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Photographing the Unconscious (imagemaker presentation)

SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Concerto D

I will discuss a series of projects I am working on under the title of “A Hundred Years of Hysteria”, inspired by case histories, photographs and films made by doctors about their psychologically disturbed patients. In my work I explore a complex relationship that grew up between scientific documentation and dramatic performance, a relationship often elided or hidden with the photographic image, with its claims of access to the real. Hysteria interests me because it was a disorder that was acted out. Like cinema, it existed only in the moment of its performance.

Zoe Beloff works with a variety of cinematic imagery: stereoscopic film, projection performance, interactive media and video installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Venues include the Whitney Museum, Rotterdam Film festival, Pacific Film Archives and the Pompidou Center. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Image: Zoe Beloff, Still from “Charming Augustine,” a 3D 16mm film, 2005

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Concerto A

For 12 months from May 2004, a webcam was placed on the roof of a 17th century coaching inn in rural Cambridgeshire, England, an area known as Silicon Fen. The Fenlandia webcam was programmed to record images a pixel a second, so that a whole image would be made up of individual pixels collected over 21.33 hours. A further work, Glenlandia is currently running in Scotland’s ‘Silicon Glen’. This presentation explores issues raised by the works including the relationship between landscape, technology and time; remote transmission and distribution; abstraction in relation to representation; and the moment of ‘right now’.

Susan Collins works across a range of media including sound, internet, video and installation, exhibiting internationally often in public and site-specific locations. Recent commissions for Tate Online and the Corporation of London. She is currently Head of Electronic Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto D

The Futurist embrace of simultaneity continues to characterise our fragmentary experience of the world.   I discuss this in relation to my videographic work, Stati d’Animo, which recalls the early photographic experiments of Etienne Jules Marey, at the same time as it uses advanced digital imaging technologies in its production.  It conflates the distinction between still and moving images. The word videographs describes the formation of the image which differs from both film and photography. It closely resembles the sequenced exposures of chronophotography by Étienne-Jules Marey which (like Henri Bergson’s reflections on time) inspired the painterly experiments of the Futurists.

Merilyn Fairskye is a Sydney-based artist who exhibits widely in Australia and internationally. Her artwork explores the contemporary world of global networks and connectivity in a variety of contexts, using photomedia, video and installation. She teaches in the Media Arts Studios of Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

Image: Merilyn Fairskye, KUL#1 /9secs, 2005, pigment print, 40 x 50cm

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto D

Science and art: universal languages searching for metaphors that will stir their viewer’s emotions and convince them of a viewpoint that, more often than not, stems from a desire to cause change.  Whether it is social change, or intellectual growth, both fields push boundaries in their own right, but also work effectively together when harmonized by brave wanderers.  With modern physics working primarily with unobservable phenomena, the two fields are conceptually closer then they have ever been.  This presentation highlights my work and discoveries as well as other unique, conceptual photographers that utilize science in their work.

Jay Gould is a working artist whose constructed photographs draw from science and storytelling.  His recent work has been awarded the Bernice Abbott Prize and an SPE Scholarship.  He received his MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and has taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops.

Image: Jay Gould, Rings, 2005

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Concerto B

In this lecture I will show images of coastal Louisiana, and discuss the loss of the barrier islands and wetlands caused by hurricanes. The images are taken while working with The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium- LUMCON, for the past five years. After living and photographing in Southern Louisiana, I observed the similarities between the destruction caused by natural phenomena and that caused by political situations.

The barrier islands of Southeast Louisiana are some of the youngest and most unstable landforms on earth. They average 5000 years in age, and are rapidly changing shape and disappearing due to the man-altered flow of the Mississippi delta. Timbalier Island, for example, averaged 20m/year towards Northwest, during the last century (U.S. geological survey). During the early 1800’s most of the barrier islands served as the summer resorts to Louisiana’s upper crust. In 1856 a devastating hurricane hit Isle Dernieres causing great loss of life and property, nearly splitting the island in half. Since then more than a dozen major storms, including Rita and Katrina, changed the geography of the coast. Today, all except Grand Isle are sand bars with a little more than skeletal remnants of industry.

Daniel Kariko was born in Yugoslavia in 1976. He moved to the United States in 1994 and received his MFA from Arizona State University. His interests in the environmental politics started in 1999 during a marine biology workshop in Louisiana. He’s been photographing the barrier islands ever since. 

Image: Daniel Kariko, Gator Tours, Hwy 90, Louisiana, 2006

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Picasso

Around 1984, I came across the work of Ignacio Aldecoa, a key social-realist writer in 1950s Spain at the peak of dictator Franco's rule. Inspired by his short stories, I set off on a two-decade-long photographic search throughout the Iberian peninsula.  My images draw on Aldecoa's recurring themes--the exodus to the city; the middle class, the low life; strange lives; the indolence of the comfortable class; the view of children; the loneliness of the old; ; and occupations--all which still remain universal and arguably parallel the changes in society brought about by today's globalization. In addition to my work from Spain and selections from other projects, this presentation addresses my experiences photographing, exhibiting and teaching abroad, which have had a profound impact on my creative work and on my role as an educator.

John Kimmich-Javier has exhibited widely and published in North America and Europe. He has taught at the Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, Nordens Fotoskola, Sweden, and Columbia College, Chicago.  Currently he teaches at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communications and is represented by Scanpix picture agency in Sweden.

Image: John Kimmich-Javier, Incoming Tide, Zumaya, Basque Country, Spain.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Picasso

Nate Larson’s photographic work uses narrative to explore the way that we construct meaning in contemporary culture through the lenses of both religious and secular cultures. His stories weave tales of ordinary days gone peculiar, obsessive methods of analysis, and of insignificant objects that suddenly take on extraordinary significance. In doing so, he investigates the line between belief and skepticism, while examining ideas of personal truth and the common misperception of photographic and related documents. This talk will focus on both his recent photographs and his new artist bookworks. More information & images are available online: www.natelarson.com

Nate Larson is a Chicago-based artist who exhibits his photoworks nationally & internationally. His artwork was recently reviewed by the New York Times and has received grant support from the Banff Centre, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Illinois Arts Council. He holds a tenured teaching appointment at Elgin Community College in Illinois.

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto B

The Virtual Immigrant draws on the experience of 1-800 call centers workers in India. These Virtual Immigrants become Americans for a workday but remain physically in India. To work in these call centers, Indians study American culture and either neutralize their Indian accents and/or adopt American ones. They virtually live between cultures without leaving their country of origin. The work portrays the constant fluidity of this new type of immigrant, relevant as we debate the gains and losses created by the effects of digital technology and globalization. The work explores the magnified cultural dislocation caused by technology's effect on shrinking distances.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s recent exhibitions include the RISD Museum, 2006 Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands and the 2005 Le Mois de la Photo Montréal Biennale. Recent grants are the John Gutmann, AIIS fellowships and an artist residency at Yaddo. Matthew is Associate Professor, University of Rhode Island and is represented by Sepia International, NYC.

Image: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Still from the animation The Virtual Immigrant (Dattatri), 2006

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Picasso

My intrigue with photographs has always sided with those images, which by their orchestration reveal much about the views of their author. Utilizing the camera's [or scanner's] ability to transform seemingly ordinary subjects into extraordinary objects whose enigmatic presence and connotative qualities are worthy of contemplation, it is my aim to provide viewers with some insight into my personal philosophies as well as components of the cultures of which I represent. Despite the seemingly seriousness of these works and these words meant to clarify them, I hope that the playfulness, wit, and humor that comprises these images also shines through.

Photographing since 1970, my education includes a BFA (San Francisco Art Institute) and MA/MFA (UNM). I have 26 years full-time teaching including appointments at UM-St. Louis, and California State University, Chico (currently). My career includes some 300 exhibitions, 60 publications, NEA grant and my photographs are in several public collections.

Image: Meat: Tom Patton, Chicken Leg, 32 x 40”

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto D

All borders are constructed, whether they be physical borders dividing nations, or socially constructed borders dividing class, race, gender or even artistic genre. I will discuss my recent work within the context of borders, travel and the displacement which occurs when one moves from one place to another, whether it be a change in physical locations (such as California, Florida, France and Mexico) or socially constructed categories (from one class to another or from one media to another). Weaving relevant writings with images, installation documentation, and video shorts, travelers of all sorts are invited to find relevance to their own lives through this presentation.

Valerie Mendoza is a multimedia artist, writer and educator. Her international exhibition record includes the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland, the 16th annual Festival International Du Film Vidéo, Vébron, France, Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL and San Francisco Camerawork among many other venues. Valerie Mendoza is an Assistant Professor at San José State University.

Image: Valerie Mendoza, video still from Different, naturally, 2006

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Picasso

The works 52 sidelong glances and One thing leads to another each comprise multiple photographic images in installation form, the former reflecting upon the impact of cross-cultural encounter during Cook’s voyages to the South Pacific, the latter of an array of street, landscape, portrait and studio photographs enacting a multi-faceted engagement with place. This presentation addresses how the serial character of these and other works operates against the grain of instantaneous, isolated images of contemporary media culture, proposing instead that photographs may operate in a relay of associations layering and deepening our experience of the world as a place of possibility, wonder and perplexity.

Debra Phillips is a Sydney-based artist whose work explores photography as an eclectic, accumulative and associative pursuit. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has recently completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She lectures in Photomedia at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Image: Debra Phillips, Man and coroza (Allpress coffee) from One thing leads to another, 2004, Giclée print, 100 x 80 cm

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Picasso

Russell’s current body of work draws heavily upon the wondrous charms of 16th century cabinets of curiosity.  She combines digital photography with found object sculpture by printing on canvas and encasing the images in weathered vegetable crates, suitcases, drawers, and lunch boxes.  Objects like false teeth, steering wheels, anonymous sculptures of nude bandits, jars of paint chips, sculpted cotton, and skull necklaces form the installation.  It is a multi-layered homage to the wunderkammer, where two-dimensional representations of fantastic and banal three-dimensional objects assume sculptural form again in their bulky, wooden, makeshift frames. 

Jacinda Russell received her MFA from the University of Arizona.  Her mixed media installations and photographs have been exhibited nationally.  Her work is represented in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  Russell is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

Image: Jacinda Russell, Wunderkammer, 2006, archival inkjet prints on canvas displayed in found boxes, Masked Statue, 15 x 7 x 2”

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Picasso

In 1999, when I returned to Iran after twenty-one years, I started working on images about Moslem women.  During these years the country has gone through many changes.  One of the first doctrines of 1979 revolution forced Iranian women to wear the Hijab or Islamic cover.  For several years, through my photography, I questioned the role of women under Islam as well as my own position as an Iranian-American woman.  In the following years, this project led me to the next Series of images: “Moslem Teenagers” and “She/He,” about which I will present my talk at the conference.  As an Iranian American, I have an access to capture the ordinary lives of Moslem families in Iran as well as in the States.  In this volatile time where Moslems are continuously being stereotyped, I believe my images can make a difference.

Soody Sharifi received her MFA from the University of Houston. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. Her international exhibition record includes Slovakia, Austria, Finland, Ireland and China. She was the 2006 finalist for Artadia Grant and 2007 Texas artist Prize.

Image: Soody Sharifi, Honeymooners from the She/ He Series, 2005, digital print, 27 x 36"

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Picasso

Pittsburgh Project consists of large-scale black-and-white panoramas from Dylan Vitone. In its heyday, the city was an economic hub that served as one of the nation’s largest producers of steel, coal, glass and aluminum, attracting scores of immigrant workers for the promise of work in the mills. With the deindustrialization of the latter 20th century, Pittsburgh suffered a massive economic decline, losing half its population over the last 50 years. This project documents the people of Pittsburgh and the struggle to reconcile its history with the uncertainty of its future. Like other cities across the nation’s rustbelt, Pittsburgh has been forced to reinvent itself.

Dylan Vitone photographs have been exhibited widely.  He is Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon.  He holds a BA from St. Edwards University, and a MFA from Massachusetts College of Art.

Image: Dylan Vitone, Getting Hair Done

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Site and Spectacle: Surveying the Springs (imagemaker)

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto D

This presentation focuses on the work of two artists who use photography and video to examine site and the spectacle of the tourist attraction. Located in two geographically and climatically disparate locations, Colorado and Florida, each artist explores the springs as sites of pleasure.  Andrea Wallace explores the mystique of the west and the cultural identity surrounding it by focusing on bathers at the Indian Springs Hot Springs. At Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, Wendy Babcox explores how myth, memory and geography can be mapped onto the cultural identity of a place through the tourist attractions that come to represent it.

Wendy Babcox is a British interdisciplinary artist who now teaches at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her work in photography and video has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She also recently completed an artwork for the Lights on Tampa public art program in January 2006.

Andrea Wallace is a photographer and video artist who received her MFA from the University of Colorado. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and Mexico. Her research is community based and is informed by issues surrounding the relationship of individuals to place, memory and identity.

Image: Andrea Wallace, Chelsea, Indian Springs, 2004, c-print

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The Space of Transmission: Michal Rovner's "Decoy" Series (lecture)

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto A

In January and February of 1991, Israeli-born artist Michal Rovner watched CNN’s around the clock coverage of the Persian Gulf War and, from the television images, produced the series Decoy. By drawing attention to the visual structure of video and television transmission – the pixelization and scan lines – Rovner reveals the layers of perceptual distance between viewer and subject. When considered in terms of Roland Barthes’ photogenia, Rovner’s images become not just about the Persian Gulf war, but also about photography itself, a visual speculation on how the medium of photography can represent something spatially distant or otherwise unseen.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto D

Batchen, Doane, Kittler, Zielinski are writers whose practices of thinking and writing challenge how and what we know of the photographic and much else besides. Magic, art, science, technology, time; this presentation will attempt to recover magical thinking in contemporary photography through the visible-invisble dark spaces of the image.

Jean Baird is an artist / writer working as a senior lecturer in the theory and practice of photography at Nottingham Trent University, England. Jean has exhibited recently in London and Slovakia, and is currently engaged in a doctoral project by publication,Magic! Writing and Transformation in Photography.

Image: Jean Baird, Ode To The Engineer (Aleksej Gastev 1882-1941), 2006

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Concerto C

“HEARTFELT” It is all about love.  This performance will more then simply report on the international photography exhibition surrounding the topic of love that I recently curated, In addition it will serve as a report on our culture mores and will include figures of speech, famous quotes, movie titles, poems, greeting card versus and statistics accompanied by multimedia projections of photographs by nationally prominent artists juxtaposed to the ephemera, artifacts from our civilization: heart shaped objects, objects with hearts on them, greeting cards ,books, records, teddy bears, bumper stickers, t-shirts and more.

This happening serves as an analysis of our acculturation of our expressions of love. A critique of our cultural views on the subject, a revelation of social customs and a re-contextualization of images. One of my premises is that many artists are much more sincere or heartfelt when creating images on the subject and are usually reporting on a significant moment from their lives which is in great contrast to the buying frenzy I witnessed at Wal-Mart on the eve of Valentines Day.   My thoughts were, why don’t these people go home and hug someone instead of attempting to purchase love with their credit cards.  Prepare for an emotional rollercoaster experience along with a surprising cast of characters interacting in the event.

George Blakely  is an award winning teacher and Professor of Art at Florida State University since 1978.  He has exhibited his artwork in over three hundred exhibitions across the country, in fact in almost every state, at museums, universities, galleries and non profit spaces. Over thirty of  them were solo exhibitions.  He has also lectured about his art and research at over seventy venues including universities, museums, galleries and conferences across the country.  Currently his favorite museum is his own house and yard where he routinely has bus loads of school children visit on field trips.  “Heartfelt” is his second major curatorial effort which is proceeded by “BANG” The gun as Image” in 1997.  He approaches the curatorial arena with his history as an installation artist.

Image: George Blakely, 2005

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Concerto D

Identity and more specifically gender is something we do, not something we are. The social “truths” about gender have more to do with manufactured meaning making than the body. The same slippery and simultaneously contradictory relationship between truth and fiction is embodied in the photograph. The body and the photograph become sites of transition, translation, exposure, and re-presentation. This lecture explores what happens when one documents, represents or performs something that is completely dependent upon context, engagement, relationship, and activity within a “still” image.

shiloh burton has practiced photography for 16 years, exhibiting nationally since 2000, with many different bodies of work. One fundamental aspect informing all of her work, is collaboration. She "makes" rather than "takes" photographs of the people she frames with her camera. Currently she is pursuing her MFA at San José State University.

Image: Shiloh Burton, Memories70

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto B

I would like to reflect on my experiences teaching art and photography to Emerati Moslem women while working as a Professor of Photography at Zayed University, Dubai, The United Arab Emirates. I will discuss how young female artists in this region are developing their own voices by drawing on their cultural and religious traditions, and incorporating influences from Western and global artistic sources. I will also share some of the photographs of my students, other Emirati photographers, and my own images to offer some insight on the culture and society that influences the work of the artists who live there.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Concerto A

What constitutes an exploitative economic exchange? Are the poor inappropriate erotic subjects for an educated elite?  The Panhandler Project consists of photographs and video that document the process of asking five male panhandlers, all of whom are homeless, to model nude.  Confronting an ethical dilemma that has been part of an academic debate about the representation and agency of the disenfranchised, DeGenevieve will address the arguments that circumscribe discussions of race, class and sex, and the manner in which each was played out in the production of this body of work.

Barbara DeGenevieve is an interdisciplinary artist who works in photography, video, and performance.  She received her MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is a professor and Chair of the Photography Department.

Image: Barbara DeGenevieve, Mike #6 from The Panhandler Project

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto C

Throughout its history photography has been defined as much by its insubstantial internal ‘spectres’ as it has by its ability to indexically record an external real. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in this alternate history, which haunts the normative history of photography. Many sophisticated contemporary artists have not been shy in redeploying hoary old ‘special effects’ to evoke affective feelings of historical revenance or altered psychological states in their viewers. Far from being discredited as extraneous to the medium these age-old phantasmagoric techniques still pack an uncanny punch. I will propose reasons for their endurance, with particular reference to Australian contemporary indigenous photographers.

Dr. Martyn Jolly is the Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art. He is an artist and a writer. His book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, was published internationally in 2006. Recently he designed the photographic component of the ACT Bushfire Memorial in Canberra.

Image: Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, 2001. Installation of thirty type-c digital photographs, which were cropped and digitally enhanced details from a collection of ‘spirit photographs’ taken in the 1920s by Ada Deane. Each sheet 60 x 40cm, image size various.

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Concerto D

The last decade female artists have proven influential on a global scale in photographic imaging. They are now in the forefront of imaging themselves and other women in an effort to define, invent, or in some cases reinvent cultural and political identities through personal narratives. This development can be seen through the works of Rineke Dijkstra, Nikki S. Lee, Shirin Neshat, and Michal Rovner. These artists share a common thread of women perceiving women while constructing meaning. Previous generations of female artists most often concentrated on the issue of deconstructing female stereotyping; whereas recent developments now allow scope for investigating new perceptions of female femininity free from previous ideological constraints.

Allyson Klutenkamper is an Assistant Professor teaching Photography/Imaging at Shawnee State University.  She holds a MFA in Photography from the University of Notre Dame and a BFA from the University of Missouri. Presently, her personal work is represented by The Photography Room Gallery and has been shown at a variety of museums and galleries nationwide.  

Isabel Graziani is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Shawnee State University. Her research interests include issues of identity construction, cultural identity, and how identity is represented in art.  Currently, she teaches a variety of courses including Women in the Arts and global surveys.   She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University.

Image: Allyson Klutenkamper, Cups, 2004-2005 from “Domicile” Series, Ultrachrome print, 60 x 40"

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto D

The New Orleans Kid Camera Project is an ongoing collaborative effort embodied by committed individuals who believe in the creative talents and assets of children.  The images produced by its participants candidly present to the world this volatile time in United States history. Photographic galleries, blogs and podcasts posted on the web allow them to share their stories with a global audience, many of whom seek an alternative to “traditional” media. These children of Post-Katrina New Orleans are our young artists, documentary photographers, historians and educators and the images they create hold a place in contemporary art.

Ariya Martin received her MFA in Imaging Arts-Fine Art Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology.  In March of 2006 she moved to New Orleans to teach in The New Orleans Kid Camera Project.  She also teaches photography at the University of New Orleans.

Tara Malik is a former teacher and current board member of The New Orleans Kid Camera Project.  She received her BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and is presently a candidate for an MAM in Arts in Youth and Community Development at Columbia College.

Image: Ariya Martin, Antoine, 6th Ward, age 13, 2006

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Picasso

The utilization of photography is continually changing. With this change comes altered means of perception. This paper focuses on the perceptive shifts that have occurred within photography and how photographic artists have influenced and reflected on these changes. I speculate on the possible futures of photography through the increasingly rapid development of novel experiential image interfaces and how these will further develop. Integration of technology will affect the reading of the still and moving image and further expand and mutate temporal and spatial possibilities. These future trends provide expanding technological toolboxes and new conceptual opportunities for artists.

Jai McKenzie utilizes digital photographic and video technology to produce digital video works, multimedia installations and photographic prints that explore the nature of technology, time and experience. She has exhibited in Australia, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. Currently she is enrolled in a Master of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Concerto D

Our sense of time informs the way that we think about landscape: from the epic to the immediate; from the expansive time-frame of geological forces to the time of human occupancy. New media technologies have provided artists with unique ways of thinking about time and thus new ways to represent landscape. The 'frozen time' of photography or the evolving time of cinema, that dominated visual representation in the C20th, is no longer the key reference point in digital works. Contemporary artists use manipulation, networking, communication technologies, high-level programming and the re-purposing of data to find new ways to address how landscape can be considered.

Peter Ride is a curator and academic. He is the Director of DA2: Digital Arts Development Agency and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Westminster. Previous jobs include the Photographers’ Gallery London and the National Museum of Photography Film and TV, UK.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto B

In 2005, my students and I visited Gustavo Frittegotto and his photographic community in Rosario, Argentina.  I expected to find standard camera club fare; instead I found remarkable photography: intelligent personal practices informed by contemporary discourse.  The students were older, established teachers, factory workers, and physicians, making work in order to understand their lives in the midst of a bitter economic depression.  Our digital revolution was hardly an option for them.  I offer their practice as a simple, sane alternative: an idea about grace, a small pocket of resistance to the new world order.

Greg Halvorsen Schreck teaches Photography and is Chair of the Art Department at Wheaton College. He makes photographs of people in relationship to the landscape (figure/ground), attending to environmental concerns. His degrees are from Rochester Institute of Technology and New York University. www.gregschreck.com

Image: Greg Halvorsen Schreck, Norberto Puzzolo, Rosario, Argentina, July 2005

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto A

This presentation will discuss extended uses of photography in the public realm. By describing contemporary practices which place imagery in the civic landscape, Susan Schwartzenberg will also discuss challenges in her photographic practice. Influenced by the critique of representation, yet committed to the idea of the social document Schwartzenberg experiments with ways to contextualize, and expand the photographic image both as art and social practice. Her projects are wide-ranging, exploring themes which include—biography, memory, urbanism and the psychology of place. Her work experiments with ways to insert ideas into the public consciousness.

Susan Schwartzenberg is a photographer /visual artist whose work explores social predicaments. Her presentation forms include, installations, books, electronic media and public works. Recent projects; Becoming Citizens; Family Life and the Politics of Disability, 2005 and Forgotten Landscapes Reappear, 2004. She is a senior artist at the SF Exploratorium.

Image: Carleton Watkins, Here 1861, from the project Forgotten Landscapes Reappear, 2004

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The Moving Photograph in a Digital World (panel discussion)

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto B

Our panel throws light on the current stage of photography's struggle with time through recent works that are neither fixed nor entirely in motion. The moving photograph may derive from traditional photographic methods such chronophotography, extremely short or long exposure times, film loops, freeze frames, animated stills-in-motion, or the "cinema of attractions." And though these "oddities" may have been with photography since its invention, current digital imaging technologies are extending the possibilities of manipulating the time base of photographs and, in the process, are uncovering new levels of temporal experience and hybrid ways of seeing and representing time.

Patti Ambrogi is an Associate Professor of Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology where she teaches The Photograph and the Moving Image and a series of courses in the Media Café Curriculum that explore the practices and descriptions that surround photography. She is the recipient of various grants for her work with the electronic canvas and awards for her teaching.

Chris Burnett is Director of Visual Studies Workshop and the MFA Program in Visual Studies in Rochester, NY. He has made significant contributions as an artist working with image and text in photography, artists' books, digital multimedia, and virtual reality software. He is currently co-editing a book on imaging technologies and new directions in visual literature.

David Tomas is an artist and writer who has exhibited in Europe and North America. His latest books, A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography Between Disciplines and Media and Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies, were published in 2004. David Tomas teaches in the Ecole des arts visuels et médiatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Image: Leyla Safavi, Great Meeting You

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto C

MP3: Midwest Photographers Publication Project, produced in collaboration by the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), features the work of Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich. Via digital manipulation, Connell photographs a single individual to represent two sides of an evolving and enigmatic relationship. Following the Lewis and Clark Trail, Newhall explores how tourism, history, and mythology have been incorporated into the landscape. Ulrich observes the surfeit of commercial goods available to U.S. consumers with humor and dismay.  Panel members Christopher McLane (Aperture) and Rod Slemmons (MoCP) will discuss this unique, collaborative partnership.  The three artists will present their work and talk about their experience of working on the MP3 Project.

Kelli Connell received a BFA from University of North Texas (1997), and an MFA from Texas Woman’s University (2003).  Her photographs are housed in several museum collections and published in books including Phaidon’s Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography.  Connell’s first NYC solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery is this May.
(www.kelliconnell.com)

Christopher McLane is the Sales and Marketing Manager for Aperture Foundation. He has a BA (Hons) Fine Art from the Cumbria Institute of Arts, in the UK. He lives and works in New York.

Justin Newhall studied at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1994) and University of Minnesota (MFA, 1998) His work was recently in shows in NY, Chicago, and Mannheim Germany. Newhall is the recipient of a McKnight Photography Fellowship, and Jerome Foundation Fellowship. Newhall resides in St. Paul, MN.
(www.justinnewhall.com)

Rod Slemmons is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He has organized numerous exhibitions including: Diane Arbus (1986); Like a One-Eyed Cat - a 30-year retrospective of the photography of Lee Friendlander (1989); and Witness: Contemporary Mexican Journalism (2004). His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications.
(www.mocp.org)

Brian Ulrich’s work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); the Robert Koch Gallery; the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego).  He teaches at the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College in Chicago. (www.notifbutwhen.com)

Image: Kelli Connell, Around Here, 2006

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto C

The panel titled Multivalent Nature will investigate three current views of nature where culture and history are entwined. Nature is a term that invites a wide range of interpretation in varied contexts and is not easily separated from space, place, and cultural definition. As photographers, each panel member employs a photographic practice that integrates their subject matter with cross-disciplinary concerns pertaining to ideas about the environment, literature, and the body. Using their hands and cameras, these artists collect images and/or artifacts. Although toward different ends, each artist lifts, recycles and reassigns meaning to images and objects with contemporary abandon.

Living on the plains of West Texas, Robin Germany works as an associate professor at Texas Tech University. Her widely exhibited photographs are part of collections such as the Polaroid Collection and the Center for Creative Photography. Germany’s work looks at the existential experience through staged and manipulated imagery.

Susan Dunkerley teaches at Baylor University. Her exhibitions throughout the U. S. and Europe have received honors such as a Fellowship from the Silver Eye Center for Photography, and an NEA Creativity grant through the Houston Center for Photography. Dunkerley’s enchanted, window-lit constructs are represented in public collections nationwide.

Photographs by Dornith Doherty have been featured in over 65 national and international exhibitions, and are included in numerous private and public collections. A recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the Japan Foundation, Doherty is currently Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Texas.

Based in Liverpool, U.K., Sara-Jayne Parsons is an independent curator and doctoral candidate in art history (UT Austin). Alongside her dissertation studies focusing on issues of place and memory in contemporary British photography, she is also currently researching the work of colonial photographers in the Middle East during World War I.

Image: Dornith Doherty, GroundWater, 2004, chromogenic print, 47 x 44”

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 10:00 - 11:45 am, Concerto A

This panel will explore photography as an essential ingredient in the consumption of images that depict contemporary catastrophes. Panelists will discuss both their personal experiences with disaster and their experiences making images that use photographic conventions to memorialize tragedy. They will discuss the numerous complications inherent in commemorating natural and human calamites. They will analyze the interplay between participant and observer. And they will consider the historical perspective constructed by photography's ceaseless chronicling of adversity and atrocity.

Margaret Stratton received National Endowment for the Arts awards in Photography (2000), and New Genres, (1995). Detained In Purgatory, Contact Sheet #110, was published by Light Work, Syracuse NY.  In 2005 she was a Fulbright nominee for Italy.  The Living and the Dead, photographs of Naples will be published in 2007.

Wyatt Gallery was recognized as one of the top “30 photographers under 30” by Photo District News, and the “top 25 photographers under 25” by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University/powerHouse Books. In 1997 he received the Daniel Rosenberg Grant, and in 1999, a Fulbright Fellowship to Trinidad.

Lonnie Graham was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant, and is a three time Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship winner. He received the 1999 Creative Achievement award by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and was cited as the 2005 Artist of the Year.

William Greiner received grants from the Louisiana Endowment for the Arts, (2004) and Louisiana Cultural Vistas April, (2005).   Exhibitions include New York University, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, NY.  Collections include the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Lori Nix received a NYFA Individual Artist Grant (2004), a Light Work Artist-in-Residence Award (2001), and two 1999/1998 Ohio Arts Council Artist Grants. Her exhibitions include the California Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, White Columns, New York, San Francisco Camerawork, and the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Deborah Willis is a leading artist, historian, curator and author on African American photography and cultural studies. She received the Anonymous Was a Woman award in 1996, and in 2001 was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellow "genius grant."  She is a Guggenheim Fellow and faculty at New York University.

Image: Gallery Remnants, Katrina

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Concerto B

How does an artist approach the making of fine art when confronted with a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina?  This panel will not address being on assignment for a client or a publication, but the more abstract art process.  Photographing a huge, public disaster such as Katrina presents a complicated situation to a photographer who pursues his or her work as art.  This panel of myself and three other artists who, not working on assignment, have returned to the Katrina hurricane zone and worked hard at trying to figure out for themselves, how do you make art in the middle of a disaster zone.  Where do you start, where do you end up.  Each artist will present their work and then a general discussion of concept and approach.

Stan Strembicki is currently a Professor of Art in the College of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis.  He has exhibited through out the USA and internationally and has taught in Florence, Italy since 1990.  He was granted a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1993 and his work from the Katrina portfolio was recently purchased by the Louisiana State Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.  His first SPE national conference was in Asilomar in 1978 and he served as the regional chair of the Midwest Region as well as having chaired numerous regional conferences.

David Graham was born smack in the middle of middle America, in Abington, Pennsylvania.  His middle America qualifications are so impeccable that CBS did a two-hour documentary about his family, with his sister as a star and David playing the role of the bratty younger brother entitled, “The Typical Teenager.”  Not one to turn his back on such high praise, David has gone on to live in Newtown, Pennsylvania, an All-American town in the suburbs of Philadelphia, ten miles from his birthplace.  He teaches at The University of the Arts, and has 10 solo books published on his work.  He was granted an NEA grant in 1984 and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant in 1999 and 1997.

Thomas Neff photographer and Professor of Art at Louisiana State University, was born in 1948 in Los Angeles, California.  Neff joined the photography faculty of the School of Art at Louisiana State University in 1982.  In addition to a full teaching load, Neff has sustained ongoing projects in Colorado and Louisiana, as well as several opportunities to photograph while abroad.  On five occasions he has worked in Italy, while serving as faculty for or director of LSU in Italy program.  He has also worked in Ireland, China and Japan.  Most recently Neff photographed Hurricane Katrina survivors and produced a body of work titled: Come Hell and High Water: Portraits of Those Who Stayed Behind.  Neff also works in the streets with a hand held camera, primarily in color.

John Woodin was born in New Orleans and lived in the ninth ward for 25 years.  His BA in Communications is from U.N.O and his MFA in Photography is from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  He has been a working photographer for over 20 years and he teaches photography at the University of Pennsylvania and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  Since the late 80’s John has been working on a series of photographs that paint an extended portrait of individuals as reflections of their environments.  His work is in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress.

Image: Thomas Neff, Greg Walstrom

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007,10:00 - 11:45 am, Concerto C

The fourth edition of the Focal Press Encyclopedia of Photography encompasses the art, science, technology, and the major practitioners of the medium since its inception to the present day. This new edition seeks to present new combinations of inferences in which it can contribute to the scholar’s ability to interpret the discipline.

Each panelist participated in a portion of this immense project and will attempt to inspire a dialog about the value and limitations of a comprehensive cataloging of the discipline.  Is this task even possible in its given cultural, regional or geo-political context? How is evidence selected, filtered and understood for this process? What value does an encyclopedic approach to knowledge have in an instantaneous and global age?

Nancy Stuart is the Executive Vice President and Provost of The Cleveland
Institute of Art. From 1984 to 2002 she held both faculty and
administrative positions at the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences
at Rochester Institute of Technology.  

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Ideas and Photographic Investigations (graduate student track)

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 9:20 am, Picasso

My image-making reveals a quirky response to my natural, social and political environment. I will present multiple photographic projects inspired by an interest in language and my curiosity with the world around me.  I photograph ideas: I formulate an idea and then I create a visual realization of that idea.  I use the camera to investigate: ‘what would happen if ?’ Each project requires forethought and planning. This clarity of thought, occasional wry visual humor and resultant simplicity of style links all my visual investigations together whether I am using photography, video or performance.

British born artist Julia Bradshaw is a third year MFA candidate at San Jose State University. She spent ten years working in Munich, Germany where she also studied photography with Michael Jochum as a member of Projekt:Fotografie.

Image: Julia Bradshaw, Tissue Blowing Project, 2006, digital c-print, 11 x 36"

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:25 - 9:45 am, Picasso

The series Ishihara Tests plays on the tension of having fetishistic images intended for the male gaze filtered through an ocular disability predominant in males—colorblindness. By appropriating images of pornography icons like Jenna Jameson and placing her image within the Ishihara template, her image becomes less about the immediacy to sexual satisfaction and more about the biology of the gaze itself. This connection between desire and the science behind it continues to inform my work, as well as the duality of woman as nurturer and woman as object of desire.

Cleveland native Alicia Ross works in the area between the fetishistic and the conceptual. She has widely exhibited nationally, and has taught photography at the university level as well as instructed digital workshops. Alicia completed her MFA thesis exhibition in December at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.

Image: Alicia Ross, Paris #1, 2006, inkjet on vinyl, 54 x 80"

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:50 - 10:10 am, Picasso

The Narrative and dialogue that occur in my day to day life are the greatest influence to my work. In this series I have been working with X rays of my father that were recently uncovered after 15 years in the basement of my childhood home. Before scanning and printing the X rays, they are worked into by hand through a process of scratching, writing and layering directly onto the surface. The text in the imagery, which is taken from telephone dialogue I’ve had with family across the country, helps the artwork represent familial traditions as well as clinically dissect my relationship with a father undergoing a chronic illness.

Becki Rutta is currently working towards a MFA from Florida State University.  Her media focus is photography, however, recent work also includes photographic techniques without the use of a camera. Her work was recently awarded The Chair’s Achievement in Art Award 2006 from the Department of Art Chair of Florida State University’s College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance. She earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2004.

Image: Becki Rutta, Do Not Return, 2006, archival pigment print

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 10:15 - 10:35 am, Picasso

The evidence of tension caused by living in close proximity to others, or the evidence of disorder between natural and man-made is what I choose to amplify in my work.  The type of structures I reference, apartments and houses, are structures that we have all experienced in various and intimate ways.  This level of familiarity is crucial, allowing the environments I create to resonate with the viewer and allow them to easily create parallels between my visual interpretations and that which they have directly experienced in their own reality while pushing them to question the distinction between what is known to be present believed to be seen. 

Ross Sawyers received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently working towards a MFA from the University of Washington where he serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant.  Ross has exhibited at galleries in Kansas City and Seattle. 

Image: Ross A. Sawyers, No Title (From Approximations), 2006, archival inkjet print, 35 x 35"

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 10:40 - 11:00 am, Picasso

Research in photographic history is a fairly new field in Spain. Spain has no tradition of scholarly research in the field, or in related educational opportunities. On the other hand, the United States has successfully established research and educational programs. This paper will analyze the status of the history of photography in Spain as an academic field. It will address the current deficiencies and suggest possible solutions. Secondly, it will compare the systems in both countries to expose the differences. Finally, this analysis will present possible future avenues to improve the way history of photography is both taught and researched in Spain.

Angelica Soleiman holds an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University/George Eastman House and has resumed her research for her PhD dissertation in her native Spain. Angelica is deeply interested in the history of photography and curatorial practices and how these disciplines influence photographic education.

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Teaching your Students / Teaching the World: Using Podcasts in Photo Education (demo)

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Concerto C

Through podcasting (distribution of audio files over the internet for “anytime” playback) my History of Photography course, I have opened the door of my classroom to the rest of the world and started a “class discussion” that is not constrained by the classroom walls or by the cultural, educational and personal backgrounds of my physical students. I’ve also been able to help my “live” students learn by providing them with asynchronous delivery of course content. I will offer a brief overview of podcasting and discuss and demonstrate tools needed to produce podcasts and get them uploaded to a server space for distribution.

Jeffrey Curto is Coordinator and Professor of Photography at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where he has taught since 1984. Curto earned his BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1981 and a MFA from Bennington College in Vermont in 1983.

Jeff Curto, Rosette, Chianti, Toscana

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2007, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Concerto B

The Corcoran Photography Department has initiated two fast-paced courses serving the needs of both the entry-level Foundation student and the student who comes to the Corcoran with significant photographic experience.  Light Studies and Optical Culture, required of all Foundation students, is an introduction to the essentials of optical experience:  workings of light, lenses, and cameras.  Students work with digital and film cameras while being introduced to elements such as focus, focal length, and duration.  Weekly Power-Point projections survey a broad range of methods emphasizing experimentation and imagination in the context of historical and contemporary photographic artists.

The second semester course Technique and Practice, is designed to serve prospective photography majors who have taken basic photography classes in high school.  It is a fast-paced class covering intermediate to advanced black-and-white darkroom practice as well as surveying the traditional genres of photographic practice.  This session will present an overview of the syllabi developed for these courses and a sampling of student work produced in the curriculum’s first year.

Claudia Smigrod, Associate Professor of Photography, Corcoran College of Art & Design and an artist based in the Washington, D.C. area.  Visiting Professor, Swarthmore College, 2002 and The University of Georgia, Studies Abroad Program, Cortona, Italy, 1999-Present.  Permanent collection of The Polaroid Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, and The Chrysler Museum, among others.

Andy Grundberg, Administrative Chair of Photography, Corcoran College of Art & Design.  A critic, curator, and teacher based in Washington, D.C.  From 1981 to 1991 he was an art critic for the New York Times; from 1992 to 1996 he was the director of The Friends of Photography in San Francisco.  His books include Crisis of the Real, (Aperture).

Claudia Smigrod, Italian Tryptich, 2003

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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007, 1:00 - 1:45 am, Concerto C

For 40 years MCG has empowered Pittsburgh urban youth through entirely cost free arts courses.  Daily buses provided at each public school drop students directly at our front doors for after school courses. In photography students are exposed to a vast combination of traditional and contemporary practices.  Professional materials and equipment are available for use and loan.  Working artists engage students with a variety of field trips and projects to challenge and enlighten them to their full potential.  The success of our culture has prompted middle school programming, artist residencies, replicated centers and starting this year MCG as a model for a K-8 school.

Dror Yaron is the Coordinator of the photography studio at the Manchester Craftsmen&rsq