Lecture

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. 

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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.

Ahead of the premier international art fair Paris Photo, and with a keen eye on the new Paris Photo New York, Presented with AIPAD in 2020, we discuss insights and practices in collecting photography today with a panel of collectors from across North America.

Why collect photography, and where to begin? How are collectors influenced, and when is it prudent to formulate collection strategies? What are the pressing conversations taking place about the market of photography? Although the seemingly more accessible of the mediums, photography is situated inside of a dense, oftentimes daunting, art market. The buying and selling of art has long crisscrossed auctions, fairs, dealers and galleries, and with the move into new digital and global territories, possibilities in collecting photography have greatly increased, and dramatically evolved.

“How to Create a Dynamic Collection of Photography in the 21st Century” shares invaluable, first-hand perspectives on the twenty-first century conditions for collecting photography and on investing in the photographic medium. We will discuss the significance of collecting to the artistic practices and cultural institutions like the Center. The panel session also promises to make collecting photography more accessible — and demonstrate why it is so worthwhile — to art enthusiasts and practitioners alike.

Panelists for this CCP Session include Paula Ely, Richard Laugharn, and Louie Palu, and moderating will be Anne Breckenridge Barrett, Director of the Center for Creative Photography, Associate Vice President for the Arts.

The Center is excited to welcome Presidential Scholar David Hume Kennerly for a presentation on his career in photojournalism, including special focus on his body of work on Senator John McCain.  The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Kennerly and Center Chief Curator Dr. Rebecca Senf. 

Kennerly has been a photographer on the front lines of history for six decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Photography at the age of 25, and he later became the chief White House photographer during President Gerald R. Ford's administration. His body of work includes images from 12 presidential campaigns, several wars, including Vietnam, and many other significant historical moments. He was also a close friend of Ansel Adams.

The honorary Presidential Scholar appointment exemplifies the university's commitment to advancing the meaning and understanding of interdisciplinary work in the arts, humanities and social sciences – disciplines that are seen as critical to success in the emerging global economy.

Dennita Sewell, the Jacquie Dorrance Curator of Fashion Design for the Phoenix Art Museum, presents The Avedon Influence on the Fashion Image. As staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and then for Vogue, Avedon’s unique eye for style evolved the fashion image for more than four decades.  Sewell's talk will explore his groundbreaking work that took fashion photography out of the studio traditions and onto the streets.

 A Buffalo Exchange Fashion Show inspired by Richard Avedon: Relationships will follow, with clothing provided by Buffalo Exchange, and models and styling provided by UA Retailing and Consumer Sciences.  

CCP Members: Supporter level and above provided with reserved seating for the lecture portion of this event. Please arrive no later than 10 minutes prior to the event start time to claim your seats.
 

The Center for Creative Photography is pleased to welcome photographer Larry Fink for a talk focusing on his significant career and influential portfolio containing works in the fine art and editorial genres. 

​Besides working as a professional photographer for over fifty-five years, Larry Fink has had one-man shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art amongst others. On the European continent, he has had one-man shows at the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Musee de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium. Recently, in the last three years, he had a traveling retrospective shown in six different Spanish museums. He was awarded the “Best of Show” for an exhibition curated by Christian Caujolle at the Arles Festival of Photograph in France. As far as being represented in group shows, the list is longer than the eye can see. Most recently, Larry has been awarded the 2015 International Center for Photography (ICP) Infinity Award for Lifetime Fine Art Photography. He has also been awarded two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Photography Fellowships. He has been teaching for over fifty-two years, with professorial positions held at Yale University, Cooper Union, and lastly at Bard College, where he is an honored professor. 

Larry’s first monograph, the seminal Social Graces (Aperture, 1984) left a lasting impression in the photographic community. There have been twelve other monographs with the subject matter crossing the class barrier in unexpected ways. Two of his most recently published books were on several “Best Of” lists of the year: The Beats published by Artiere /powerhouse andLarry Fink on Composition and Improvisation published by Aperture. His most recent book is Opening the Sky, published by Stanley / Barker. As an editorial photographer, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair have been amongst a long list of accounts.
 
Fink On Warhol: New York Photographs of the 1960s, features rare photographs of Andy Warhol and his friends at the Factory interspersed with street scenes and the political atmosphere of 1960s New York. Additionally, he is currently working on a massive retrospective book to be published by the University of Texas Press. Grafiche dell’Artiere in Bologna will make the exquisite prints for the book.

A members' dinner will be held after the lecture. RSVP via email here.