Lecture

This third and final installment of the Spring 2023 Lecture Series brings Dr. Sarah K. Khan to the Center for Creative Photography. Dr. Khan is an author, photographer, multi-media maker, and producer of Migrant Kitchens. Dr. Khan works at the crossroad of food, culture, and migration. Her solo, group exhibitions, and film screenings are available to browse on her website.

In this lecture, "Contemporary Migrant Kitchens: Empty-Handed Not Empty-Headed," Dr. Khan discusses her project "Migrant Kitchens," a series of short films from 2015-2017 on migrants in Queens, NY. An on-going project, Dr. Khan created the work to highlight the obstacles hard working citizens face, daily, in the most diverse community in the world. Dr. Khan also shares how she created the project, the multiple media she uses to story tell, and the larger impact the media morsels have on select Queens residents and their communities at large.

Dr. Khan’s creations are informed by training in Middle Eastern history (BA), public health and nutrition (MPH, MS) and traditional ecological knowledge systems/plant sciences in South Asia and China (PhD). A two-time Fulbright scholar, Khan has been awarded artist residencies, grants, and fellowships. Her work has appeared in Museum of the Moving Image, Madison Children’s Museum, The Kimmel Gallery at NYU, Queens Museum, Asian Arts Initiative, Asian American Writers Workshop Open City, Roads and Kingdoms, Culinary Backstreets, The Art of Eating, and Modern Farmer.  

Inspired by global issues important to Linda McCartney, CCP’s Spring 2023 Lecture Series is generously sponsored by JP Morgan Chase & Co.

*All events are FREE and open to the public, with first-come, first-serve auditorium seating. 

Latinx Digital Humanities, with Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

Hispanic Serving Institute (HSI)-Public and Applied Humanities Artist-in-Residence, in collaboration with "El Pueblo Urban Humanities Studio," a Spring 2023 Public and Applied Humanities Course

About the Talk:

In this lecture, Dr. Hidalgo presents her groundbreaking work, Casos De Justicia, and the engaged digital humanities research methodology of augmented fotonovelas. Drawing from critical anthropology, Chicanx/Latinx visual cultural studies and the emerging field of urban humanities, Hidalgo provides students and guests with a case study that charts the ways research and co-creative practices shape activism and communities, and vice versa.

About Our Speaker:

Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale. She received her PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose scholarship integrates ethnographic methods, digital humanities, and Latinx geographies in analyzing contemporary urban labor struggles and resistance. Her forthcoming book, Abolitionist Marketplaces (under contract with Duke University Press), is based on a seven-year visual ethnography with the leaders of the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This book puts forward a new theoretical framework for analyzing how informal workers living under legal forms of violence center radical consciousness, self-care, and community-care to collectively organize and transform the urban spaces and city policies where they live and work. In addition, Hidalgo has an ongoing digital humanities project with the LASVC that draws on a visual research method she developed called augmented fotonovelas (photo-based comics) that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to merge ethnographic data with photography, audio, and video imagery so that multiple publics can “see” and “hear” aggrieved communities. Articles from these projects have recently been published in the Journal of Latino Studies and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Born in Los Angeles, to a Salvadoran father and U.S. mother, she spent her childhood living between Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s and 90s. Currently she resides in CT with her husband and two children

About the Course:

PAH 200: Introduction to Public and Applied Humanities the “El Pueblo Urban Humanities Studio” is a Spring 2023 GE course that introduces students across disciplines to public humanities methodologies and case studies through an experiential urban humanities field studio in partnership with the Sunnyside Foundation, whose mission centers on service to Tucson’s Southside. Students will produce photo-based projects about the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, a site established within the historical context of the Chicano movement of Tucson in the 60s/70s, that continues to this day to serve as a hub for social and metropolitan services and cultural empowerment in the predominantly Latinx Southside community. 

The course is also a collaboration with campus partners (the Center for Creative Photography, the Experiential Learning Design Accelerator Program and HSI Initiatives Faculty Seed Grant Program) which sponsored resources for the redesign of PAH 200 with such resources as visual literacy and research modules, materials and exhibition support; our very own HSI-PAH artist-in-residence (Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo); peer mentors and community members time during site-visits and pin-ups.  The students will start with visual literacy modules led by the CCP team (inspired by their own exhibition on Linda McCartney and her teacher —Hazel Larsen Archer’s groundbreaking approach to photo education), then begin a semester-long investigation of El Pueblo, examining case studies, conducting site visits, participating in group-interviews and designing photo-shoots with community storytellers, all to culminate in a public-facing event of an exhibition at El Pueblo and the CCP in May of 2023.

This spring, the Center for Creative Photography will present an exciting series of conversations inspired by Linda McCartney’s work as both a photographer and an activist. Through lectures and panels with artists, curators, and entrepreneurs, the aim is to nurture meaningful discussions on pressing historical, cultural, and environmental issues globally through the lens of photography.

This 3-part series will run on the following dates:

Lecture by Sarah Brown, Photographic Curator of the Linda McCartney Archive, in conversation with CCP Chief Curator, Dr. Rebecca Senf. Saturday, February 25, noon. This lecture will be held at the Forum at UA's Health Sciences Innovation Building (HSIB)

Daniella Zalcman & Verónica Sanchis Bencomo in Conversation, moderated by CCP Curator of Interdisciplinary & Community Practices, Dr. Meg Jackson Fox. Meet Daniella Zalcman, photographer & founder of Women Photograph and Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, photographer & founder of Foto Féminas, on Thursday, March 30, 5:30pm. This lecture will be held at the CCP Auditorium.

Screening & Lecture with Dr. Sarah K. Khan, author, photographer, multi-media maker, and producer of Migrant Kitchens. Thursday, April 27, 5:30pm. This lecture will be held at the CCP Auditorium.

The CCP's Spring 2023 Lecture Series is generously sponsored by JP Morgan Chase & Co.

*All events are FREE and open to the public, with first-come, first-serve auditorium seating.

Join us for a lecture by Graciela Iturbide as she discusses her immense 50+ year career in photography, co-hosted by Etherton Gallery and the Center for Creative Photography, with consecutive interpretation by Jaime Fatás Cabeza. Then on Saturday, September 24, 2022, from 7 to 10PM, join the opening reception at Etherton Gallery for Graciela Iturbide: Sueños, Símbolos y Narración (Dreams, Symbols, and Storytelling).

About Graciela Iturbide. Born 1942 in Mexico City, Mexico, Graciela Iturbide studied cinematography at university and then worked as an assistant to Mexican modernist master, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. He became a lifelong mentor and encouraged her in developing her own artistic vision.

Now considered one of Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, her work has graced more than sixty exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. In 2007, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles held a retrospective exhibition, The Goat’s Dance. Graciela Iturbide is the 2008 winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, and, in 2015, the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center for Photography.

The Hasselblad Foundation’s award jury said "Iturbide has extended the concept of documentary photography, to explore the relationships between man and nature, the individual and the cultural, the real and the psychological… [Her photography] is of the highest visual strength and beauty and continues to inspire a younger generation of photographers in Latin America and beyond."

Graciela Iturbide’s photography can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Tate Modern, London, the Musée National d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán, Oaxaca, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Photography, Hokkaido, Japan, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Tarrah Krajnak will talk about her photography career and 2021 book project, “El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan,” presented by the School of Art Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series and in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography. Krajnak, an artist researcher with Unseen California based in Los Angeles, was born in Lima, Peru, in 1979.

Named after a time-bending short story by Borges, “El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan” moves between found photographs, original writing, and appropriated images taken from 1979 Peruvian political magazines. Indigenous to Peru and orphaned as an infant, Krajnak was adopted into a transracial American family. After 30 years she returns to the orphanage to understand her place within the historical narratives of her birthplace.

“El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan” was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award and named to MoMA’s inaugural list of 10 photo books of the year. The book is now in numerous library collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, RISD, Printed Matter, and The National Library among others.

Krajnak’s research for Unseen California will take place on sites closely related to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston for her ongoing series “Master Rituals,” in which she uses the camera, her body and performance to engage with the problematic canons of modern photography through acts of erasure, redaction, and re-enactment.

Her photographs are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig, and the Pinault. Her work has been published and reviewed in Aperture, Artforum, New York Review of Books, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Glasstire, Contact Sheet, East of Borneo, and others. Residencies include Bemis, Light Work, and Center for Photography Woodstock. Recent exhibitions include CalArts REDCAT Los Angeles, Art Basel, Paris Photo, Photo London, Rencontres d’Arles, Filter Photo, Houston Center for Photography, SUR Biennial, and Silver Eye, among others.

She is the recipient of the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Hariban Grand Prize, Kyoto, Japan, and a 2020 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize.

Photographer Alanna Airitam and author Kirsten Imani Kasai discuss the experience of being photographed as a subject for The Golden Age and the dynamics of race, identity, belonging, and colorism as it pertains to this photographic series as well as their independent works of art and literature.

The conversation will be held in the Center Galleries. Seating for this event will be limited and on a first-come basis.

About Alanna Airitam. Questioning generalized stereotypes and the lack of fair representation of Black people in art spaces has led photographer Alanna Airitam to research critical historical omissions and how those contrived narratives represent and influence succeeding generations. Her portraits, selfportraits, and vanitas still life photography in series such as The Golden Age, Crossroads, White Privilege, Colonized Foods, Ghosts, and individual works such as Take a Look Inside and How to Make a Country ask the viewer to question the stories of history and heritage we were taught to believe. Alanna was named on the 2021 Silver List as one of 47 exciting contemporary photographers to follow. She is a 2020 San Diego Art Prize winner and recipient of the 2020 Michael Reichmann Project Grant Award. Her photographs have been exhibited at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Art Miami with Catherine Edelman, San Diego Art Institute, Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, and Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been acquired for the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collection and three prints from The Golden Age were recently added to the Center for Creative Photography’s permanent collection. Airitam is a Board Member and led workshops and mentorships for Oakwood Arts. She is also elected Board Member for Medium Photo and was the Juror of the 2021 Black Photographers Scholarship Program for Medium Photo. Born in Queens, New York, Airitam now resides in Tucson, Arizona.

About Kirsten Imani Kasai. A Gothic Research Studies Ph.D. candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, Kirsten Imani Kasai celebrates literature as a change agent that pushes us out of our comfort zones to unmake or mend us. She is the author of three novels: The House of Erzulie (2018, Shade Mountain Press) a Gothic tale set in 1850s New Orleans, and the speculative fiction series Ice Song (2009, Random House) and Tattoo (2011, Random House). She has taught creative writing, literature, editing, and publishing workshops at San Diego State University and Southern New Hampshire University. According to Foreword Reviews, “Kirsten makes the macabre beautiful.” Visit her online at KirstenImaniKasai.com.

{POSTPONED}  The question of the photographed subject presents a central ethical and political challenge today that is invariably bound up with centuries of image production, with the lenses through which we have constructed our selves and another’s self. Sama Alshaibi and Dr. Deborah Willis will take an immersive look into the visual and identity politics of portraiture and self-portraiture, into imagining the body as a setting in which political and personal narratives intersect and unfold. Together they will inquire into the registers of photography and the human experience—of gender, race, religion, politics and art. What does it mean to excavate image histories that simultaneously revise the sense of ourselves today? How, and to what extent, can we be attentive to what stories live in the body? In what ways are we able to tackle such urgent issues as migrations, borders, and power through photography? Theirs is work not only vital to the civil discourses of our moment, but also of deep significance as we look to yesterday’s discourses and forward to tomorrow’s.

This CCP event is presented with the generous support from the Arizona Arts Diversity and Inclusion Committee grant, the Arizona Arts' Racial Justice Studio, donors John and Sandi Flint, and the University of Arizona School of Art and VASE Lecture Series.

About Dr. Deborah Willis. Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Framing Moments in the KIA," "Migrations and Meanings in Art", "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography; Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University.

About Sama Alshaibi. Sama Alshaibi works between photography, video, and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environment. Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium, a staging site for encounters, peripheries, and refuge, even when carrying the markings of war and dislocation. In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum's Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AK), the 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), MARTA Herford Museum (Germany), Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), and Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Regents Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

Join us on Thursday, February 18, 2021. Co-presented by the University of Arizona School of Art Visiting Artists and Scholars Series (VASE)

The University of Arizona School of Art Visiting Artists and Scholars Series and the Center for Creative Photography are excited to collaborate in hosting Huey Copeland: Touched by the Mother.

In this lecture, art historian Huey Copeland provides an overview of his work on and approach to modern and contemporary art, with a focus on his forthcoming collection of essays, interviews, and reviews, Touched by the Mother: On Black Men, the Aesthetic Field, and Other Feminist Horizons, 1966-2016. This volume encompasses a range of unique practices, from the assemblages of Noah Purifoy to the "paintings" of Mark Bradford, all united by their engagement with American art and culture of the 1960s and ‘70s. Just as important, in “Touched by the Mother”—a title borrowed from the work of renowned cultural theorist Hortense Spillers—Copeland articulates how his black queer feminist method draws from various discourses in thinking the intersections of race and gender, history and memory, subjectivity and sexuality, art and culture. This approach, he argues, productively expands our understanding of both art-historical practice and the aesthetic itself.

Huey Copeland is an art historian, critic, teacher, administrator, and occasional curator based in Chicago. Currently, he is Interim Director of the Black Arts Initiative, Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor, and Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, where he also enjoys affiliations with African American Studies, Art Theory & Practice, Critical Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies. His research focuses on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. An editor of OCTOBER and a contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals as well as in numerous international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. Most notable among his publications is Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, a book published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. At present, Copeland is at work on two complementary volumes: “In the Shadow of the Negress: A Brief History Modern Artistic Practice in the Transatlantic World,” which explores the constitutive role played by fictions of black womanhood in Western art from the late 18th century to the present, and “'Touched by the Mother': On Black Men, the Aesthetic Field, and Other Feminist Horizons, 1966–2016,” which brings together a selection of his critical essays. In 2019, his contributions to the field were recognized by the High Museum of Art with the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art History.

Join the free event here via Zoom.

Co-organized by the Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA) and the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ). This virtual program is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Register here. 

 Rebecca Senf will speak about and read short excerpts from her new book Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams, which reveals details about how the photographer’s early decades changed the course of his successful career. Bring questions for a lively discussion with this Ansel Adams scholar.

About the book:
Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
Rebecca A. Senf; with a foreword by Anne Breckenridge Barrett
An unprecedented and eye-opening examination of the early career of one of America’s most celebrated photographers
Purchase book here. 

One of the most influential photographers of his generation, Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams’s images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams’s career, Rebecca A. Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams’s artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist’s mature oeuvre.

Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams’s photographic practice—beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist’s persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist’s environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club.

About the author:

Dr. Rebecca A. Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and recently published a book on Ansel Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, co-published by the CCP and Yale University Press.

This lecture is now a virtual event.  Join us at 11:00am PT for a (Virtual) Public Talk via Zoom here. 

There will be an introduction by Mark McKnight, followed by a 40-minute talk and a 15-minute Q&A session.

CCP Members- Join us at 12:00pm PT for a CCP Members Highlight via Zoom here. Learn more about CCP membership here. 

What do we leave behind as human beings, and how can it compare to lived experience? When a person dies, who decides what should be kept and how to keep it? Though photographers are often preoccupied with mortality and the passage of time these questions are central to Matthew Leifheit’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans photography, film, text, and print media. A 2018 manifesto coauthored by Leifheit and the photographer Rachel Stern decrees it important for artists to feel “harried by death.” To Die Alive, a lecture conceived specifically for the context of the Center for Creative Photography, is a retrospective of Leifheit’s collaborative efforts to date, comprising a “manic and varied outpouring against time, in anticipation of eventually becoming archival material ourselves.” Topics will include long-term projects depicting historically queer spaces like Fire Island and Key West, recent forays into archivally-engaged erotic filmmaking, and MATTE Magazine, the independent journal of emerging photography that Leifheit founded in 2010.

About Matthew Leifheit: 
Matthew Leifheit (born 1988, Chicago, IL) is an American photographer, magazine-editor, publisher, and professor based in Brooklyn, NY. He is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, and was formerly the photo director of Vice Magazine. Leifheit has written criticism and interviews about art and photography for Aperture, Vice, and Time. Leifheit holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. His photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections including the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art Library and Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Gayletter, Out, Vice, and The Yale Daily News. Leifheit is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design.