Lecture

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. 

For more information on the postponement of this lecture, click here. 

Photography moves nimbly across the spectrum of lived experience. So much of how we identify—our physical appearance, social connections, surrounding environment, political affiliations, familial relationships—is communicated through a photograph. As it rapidly becomes astoundingly ubiquitous, photography attends to the popular need to see, to stabilize, and to make sense of our selves and one another. This need can power photographs to deliver radical, unexpected ways of being and thinking. Paradoxically, the same need can flatten the complexity of our stories and our selves. How do we avoid becoming lost in a sea of our own images?

The CCP’s Spring Lecture Series will bring together artists and scholars for an extended conversation on the way in which photography is entangled with the human self. How has photography shaped self-perception? Can visual representations be attentive to the flux and infiniteness of our shifting identities? How do photographs participate as a meaning-making enterprise, and do visibility, and hyper-visibility, reveal or conceal our self? What roles do self-portraits and selfies play in a global, contemporary society?

This multi-part series runs on the following dates: March 19, March 26, April 9 and April 17.

For more information on the postponement of this lecture, click here. 

This CCP Spring Lecture Series event features a presentation by Sybil Venegas: 

Identity, Community, Sexuality: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Laura Aguilar

Los Angeles Photographer Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) is internationally renowned for her work in nature, specifically self portrait nudes in which her body echoes the landscape. However, prior to these now iconic self portraits, Aguilar documented diverse identities throughout the Los Angeles area in loving homage to the communities that nurtured her identity as a large, brown, Chicana lesbian photographer. The lecture, Identity, Community, Sexuality: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Laura Aguilar will focus on the early influences that formed Aguilar as an emerging artist and how they informed her later work.

Advocate, Patron, and Director's Circle Members, join us after the lecture for a small reception with Sybil Venegas. The reception will take place immediately follwoing the lecture on the 2nd floor of the Center. Please RSVP in advance to ccp-events@email.arizona.edu.

For more information on the 2020 CCP Spring Lecture Series click here.

For more information on the postponement of this lecture, click here. 

Embodying Self as Subject, with Sama Alshaibi and Deborah Willis

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 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 Spring Lecture series event is presented with the generous support from the College of Fine Arts Diversity and Inclusion Grant.

About Sama Alshaibi:

Sama Alshaibi’s photographs, videos and immersive installations examine the mechanisms of fragmentation in the aftermath of war and exile.  They feature a female figure, often her own, that references a complex site of struggle and identification, and confront an image history of photographs and moving images through a feminist perspective. Recent exhibitions include the State of The Art 2020, Crystal Bridges (Arkansas, 2020), 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), and solo exhibitions at Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019) and Artpace (San Antonio, 2019). Alshaibi received the 2019 Project Development Award from the Center (Santa Fe), 2018 Artist Grant from the Arizona Commission on The Arts, and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut). Her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In was published by Aperture, NYC in 2015. Alshaibi’s twenty-one solo exhibitions and over 150 group exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, Pen + Brush (NYC, 2019), 2018 Breda Photo Festival (Netherlands), American University Museum (Washington D.C., 2018), 2017 Honolulu Biennial, Marta Herford Museum (Germany, 2017), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (NY, 2017), SMoCA (Scottsdale, 2016), and MoMA (NYC, 2012). Alshaibi was a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in 2014-2015 in Ramallah, West Bank. She holds a MFA in Photography, Video, and Media Arts from the University of Colorado. Alshaibi is Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at University of Arizona, Tucson.

About Dr. Deborah Willis:

Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation; contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Willis is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; and co-author of The Black Female Body A Photographic History; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles a NAACP Image Award Winner). Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "In Pursuit of Beauty" at Express Newark; "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University. Since 2006 she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring imaging the black body in the West such as the conference titled Black Portraiture[s] which was held in Johannesburg in 2016. She has appeared and consulted on media projects including documentary films such as Through A Lens Darkly and Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, which received the ICP Infinity Award 2015, and American Photography, PBS Documentary.  

For more information on the 2020 CCP Spring Lecture Series click here.

For more information on the postponement of this lecture, click here. 

___

The CCP Spring Lecture Series kicks off on March 19 with Dr. Lev Manovich. Dr. Manovich brings to the CCP's extended conversation on self, self portraits, and selfies the perspective of a digital culture and media art theorist. With the enthusiastic support of UA's Center for Digital Humanities and Data Studies, the lecture promises interdisciplinary thinking about photography and our global network of (self) images, making space for new connections between and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Members, join us at 5:00pm for a sneak peek of the evening's print viewing with a short talk led by Associate Curator of Academic and Public Programs, Dr. Meg Jackson Fox taking place at 5:30pm. Please RSVP to ccp-events@email.arizona.edu.

How to See a City? Photography, Maps, and Data Visualization

19th and 20th century painters, photographers, filmmakers and media artists created many different methods to represent city life and the everyday.  In the 21st century, designers and scientists started to develop new methods using new types of urban data (social media posts, sensor networks, satellite imagery, etc.) and methods (interactive data visualization, machine learning). In his lecture, Manovich will compare older and newer methods, and discuss a number of urban data visualization projects created in the last 15 years.

Manovich will also present selected projects from my Cultural Analytics Lab, including work created for New York Public Library, Museum of Modern Art in NYC (MoMA) and Google. These projects explore new ways of interacting with and exploring large photo collections. They include visualizations of 20,000 historical images from MoMA Photography collection; analysis of 2.3 million Instagram photographs shared in 3 global cities; an installation that presents life along Broadway street in NYC using 30 million data points and images, and comparison of 3840 selfies from six global cities.

Presented in collaboration with the Center for Digital Society and Data Studies

About Dr. Lev Manovich:

Dr. Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of 13 books including AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. Manovich is a Presidential Professor in PhD Program in Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab that pioneered analysis of visual culture using computational methods. The lab created projects for Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, Google and other clients.

For more information on the 2020 CCP Spring Lecture Series click here.

The Center is pleased to welcome photographer David Benjamin Sherry for an artist talk about his new book American Monuments, published by Radius Books. A book signing will follow, with copies available to purchase at the gift shop.

 American Monuments is a landscape photography project that captures the spirit and intrinsic value of America’s threatened system of national monuments. In April 2017 an executive order called for the review of the 27 national monuments created since January 1996. In December 2017 the final report called on the president to shrink four national monuments and change the management of six others, recommending that areas in Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans be offered for sale, specifically for oil drilling and coal and uranium mining. American Monuments focuses on the areas under review, with special emphasis on those that have already been decimated. Sherry documents these pristine, sacred, and wildly diverse areas using the traditional, historic 8×10 large format. The resulting photographs not only convey the beauty of these important and ecologically diverse sites, but also shed light upon the plight of the perennially exploited landscape of the American West.

David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981) specializes in large-format film photography made with meticulous attention to analog photographic processes. Sherry’s use of vibrant monochrome color began while studying for his MFA at Yale. Working closely with master printer and photographer Richard Benson, Sherry discovered that through analog printing techniques, he could manipulate color film to chromatic extremes. For Sherry, the vibrant colors he incorporates into the work are a conduit for his intense, sometimes mystical connections to the natural world and reflect his own queer experience of traversing the American West.