Lecture

In conjunction with our exhibition Richard Avedon: Relationships, the Center is excited to welcome Paul Roth.

Paul Roth has over 25 years of experience working with some of the most important photography collections in North America. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He is co-author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: The Flàvio Story (Steidl, 2017), author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012), and author and editor of Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (Steidl/Corcoran, 2008).

View details about our members-only event here.

Center for Creative Photography presents An Evening In Conversation with Ralph Gibson. This discussion with Gibson and CCP Director Anne Breckenridge Barrett will focus on Gibson’s career and highlight his 2018 autobiography Self Exposure. The evening will conclude with a book signing. Copies of Self-Exposure will be available for purchase. Admission is free.

Seating in the CCP auditorium is first-come, first-served. CCP Members at Supporter level and above are provided with reserved seating. Please arrive no later than 10 minutes prior to the event start time to claim your seats.

Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute (1960-62). He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book making. In 1970 he published the famous trilogy of photo books: The Somnambulist, Deja-vu and Days at Sea. His most current book, The Black Trilogy reexamines these bodies of work. To date he has produced over 40 monographs. 

His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the world, and have appeared in hundreds of exhibitions. Gibson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1975, 1986), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D.) Exchange, Berlin (1977), a New York State Council of the Arts (C.A.P.S.) fellowship (1977), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). The Rencontres d'Arles festival presented his work in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1989 and 1994. His book "Syntax" received a mention for the Rencontres d'Arles Book Award in 1983. He was decorated as an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986) and appointed, Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005) by the French government. 

His awards include: Leica Medal of Excellence Award (1988), "150 Years of Photography" Award, Photographic Society of Japan (1989), a Grande Medaille de la Ville d'Arles (1994) and the Lucie Award for lifetime achievement (2008). Gibson also received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland (1991), and a second honorary doctorate from the Ohio Wesleyan University (1998).

The Center is excited to present the West Coast debut of Danny Lyon's new documentary in conjunction with his exhibtion at Etherton Gallery. The evening will also feature Lyon in conversation with Chief Curator Becky Senf.

Wanderer is the fourth in a series of films that began in 1971. It takes place in the town of Llanito, New Mexico, and updates the stories of members of the Sanchez and Jaramillo families, many of whom are also presented in the photographs on display at the gallery.

Seating is limited- please plan to arrive early. Reserved seats will be released 15 minutes prior to the screening. 

Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn during World War Two. When he was twenty-one he moved to Atlanta, and every couple years he moved further west, first to New Orleans, and then to East Texas. In 1970 he settled in a village called Llanito, near the town of Bernalillo, in the Rio Grand Valley in New Mexico. His work had taken him deeper and deeper into the heart land, what is now called “fly over country.” Like many artists before him he fell in love with the desert and stopped to build a home and raise a family. Meeting an undocumented worker named Eddie who was fleeing immigration, Lyon and Eddie built and adobe home. He also became Eddie’s coyote, helping to smuggle him each year across the border which was four hours from his home. He made a series of films centered on his neighbors in Llanito and Bernalillo, culminating  in “Willie” the end of the New Mexico trilogy.

In 2016 Lyon returned to Bernalillo to make a film. Using a small digital video camera that weighed a pound, he re-visited the Jaramillo family, focusing on Willie’s little brother Ferney, his sister Gloria, and his niece Janice. A neighbor, Dennis Baca lights the candles at the Lady of Sorrows Cemetery where Willie and Johnnie Sanchez are buried. Lyon’s dog Trip, an Australian Shepard appears alone, wandering through a gigantic auto junk yard, swimming the San Juan River, and eventually arriving at the New Mexico State Fair. Ferny and Dennis meet there, and as the carny photographer makes their portrait she asks “Are you two brothers?” Wanderer, done in the age of global warming, is a dark portrait of a small town done in a desert that is eternal.

Join the Center for a very special evening with photographer Steve McCurry. McCurry will be featured in conversation with CCP Director Anne Breckenridge Barrett.

Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than 30 years, with scores of magazine and book covers, several books, and countless exhibitions around the world to his name.

Born in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania McCurry studied film at Penn. State University before going on to work for a local newspaper. After several years of freelance work, McCurry made his first of what would become many trips to India. Traveling with little more than a bag of clothes and another of film he made his way across the subcontinent, exploring the country with his camera. It was after several months of travel that he found himself crossing the border into Pakistan. There, he met a group of refugees from Afghanistan, who smuggled him across the border into their country, just as the Russian Invasion was closing the country to all Western journalists. Emerging in traditional dress with a full beard and weather-worn features after weeks embedded with the Mujahedeen, McCurry brought the world the first images of the conflict in Afghanistan, putting a human face to the issue on every masthead.

Since then, McCurry has gone on to create stunning images over six continents and countless countries. His work spans conflicts, vanishing cultures, ancient traditions, and contemporary culture alike - yet always retains the human element that made his celebrated image of the Afghan Girl such a powerful image.

McCurry is the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, National Press Photographers Award, and an unprecedented four first prize awards from the World Press Photo contest. The Minister of French Culture has also appointed McCurry a Knight of the Orders of Arts and Letters, and recently the Royal Photographic Society in London awarded McCurry the Centenary Award for Lifetime Achievement. Steve McCurry has published sixteen books of his photographs among them: Afghanistan (2017); On Reading (2016); India (2015); From These Hands: A Journey Along the Coffee Trail (2015); Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs (2013); and The Iconic Photographs (2011).

This lecture is in conjunction with Etherton Gallery's exhibition The Unguarded Moment, featuring photos by McCurry of Asia and the Middle East. 

Image: Steve McCurry, Afghan Girl (Sharbat Gula), 1984, digital chromogenic print ©Steve McCurry, courtesy Etherton Gallery

Join us for a discussion about the shift from analog to digital media across platforms, from music to photography. Damon Krukowski is a musician (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500), author of the book The New Analog (The New Press/MIT Press), and host of the podcast Ways of Hearing (from Radiotopia’s Showcase). He was educated at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Celebrate the closing of Courting Failure, Embracing Risk: Mark Klett and Collaboration with a presentation by Mark Klett. Klett is a photographer interested in making new works that respond to historic images; creating projects that explore relationships between time, change and perception; and exploring the language of photographic media through technology. His background includes working as a geologist before turning to photography. Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. Klett’s work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally for over thirty-five years, and his work is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide. He is the author/co-author of fifteen books. Klett lives in Tempe, Arizona where he is Regents’ Professor of Art at Arizona State University.

CCP Members- please join us for a Members Only gallery tour with Mark Klett and CCP Chief Curator Dr. Rebecca Senf at 4:00 pm. RSVP for the tour to ccp-events@email.arizona.edu

Award-winning novelist and writer Geoff Dyer will share his most recent exploration into the world of photography. Succumbing to a long-term fascination, Dyer delved into the work of Garry Winogrand, one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world’s foremost street photographers. Modeled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, Dyer’s newest book The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand features one hundred photographs from the Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). In addition to presenting the story of the book’s creation and his experiences researching at the CCP, Dyer will take us on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from Winogrand’s vast archive, with responses to the photographs that are unorthodox, funny, and eye-opening.

Geoff Dyer’s many books include The Ongoing Moment (winner of the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award for Writing/Criticism), But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Out of Sheer Rage (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award), The Missing of the Somme, the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award). His latest book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize and, most recently, the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Dyer is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Dyer currently lives in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.

Join the Center for a special presentation by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. Kennerly will present on his friendship and collaboration with Ansel Adams, offering a more personal look at the Center's co-founder. This presentation is a part of the 2018 Ansel Adams Public Celebration.

Kennerly won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for his pictures from the Vietnam War, refugees from East Pakistan, combat in Cambodia, and the Ali-Frazier fight. Two years later, at 27, he was appointed President Gerald R. Ford's chief White House photographer. Kennerly was named, "One of the 100 Most Important People in Photography," by American Photo Magazine.

He was a contributing editor for Newsweek for more than a decade, and a contributing photographer for Time and Life magazines. Kennerly has published several books of his work, Shooter, Photo Op, Seinoff: The Final Days of Seinfeld, Photo du Jour, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, David Hume Kennerly On the iPhone, and he was a major contributor to CNN’s 2016 campaign book, Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything. 

In 1979 Kennerly’s photo of famed photographer Ansel Adams appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine, the first and last time a photographer was ever featured on the front of TIME.

In 2015 he was recipient of the prestigious Lucie Award for achievement in photojournalism. Kennerly received an honorary doctorate from Lake Erie College, and was their 2015 commencement speaker.

He is also an Explorer of Light, one of an elite group of photographers sponsored by Canon.  

Seating for this presentation is limited- please plan to arrive early.

This talk will explore the ways in which rephotography has illuminated geologic debates, including uniformitarianism (slow and steady change) versus catastrophism (the predominance of sudden extreme changes) in landscape evolution. Professor Pelletier will discuss the ways in which Mark Klett and his collaborators use rephotography to illuminate the ways 19th-century photographers of the western U.S. framed their images to advocate particular geologic viewpoints. The uniformitarian vs. catastrophic debate continues in modified form to this day. He will also discuss the ways that landscape change is quantified by modern geoscientists and the debates regarding the relative importance of small, common versus large, rare events that can result from differing interpretations of existing data. 

Jon D. Pelletier is a Professor of Geosciences at The University of Arizona. His specialty is geomorphology, the study of the landforms such as river valleys and sand dunes. His work involves computer modeling of water and air flow over landscapes and the resulting sediment transport and topographic change that give rise to some of the startling beauty of the natural world. His love of art came from his father, who took him to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for adult conversations about art beginning at a young age. In his work he seeks to combine a scientific understanding of geologic processes with an artistic appreciation for the beauty of nature.

Image Credit: Masao Yamamoto, #1684 from Kawa=Flow, 2016 gelatin silver print with mixed media, ©️Masao Yamamoto, courtesy Etherton Gallery

On Friday, January 12, 2018 at 5:30 pm the Center will present a public artist's talk by Masao Yamamoto, a visiting photographer from Japan. This lecture is in conjunction with Etherton Gallery presenting the photographs of Rodrigo Moya, Graciela Iturbide and Masao Yamamoto in Mementos. The exhibition highlights the photograph as keepsake, a token of remembrance instilled with memories and dreams long past. 

About the Artist

Masao Yamamoto was born in 1957 in Gamagori city, Aichi Prefecture in Japan. He studied painting before taking up photography full time in1993. Yamamoto has published over a dozen books, most recently Tori (Radius Books, 2016). His photographs have been exhibited at galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, Japan, Russia and Brazil. Yamamoto's work has been reviewed in numerous publications and blogs including, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Photonews, Black and White, and Unseen. Masao Yamamoto’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; International Center of Photography, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Sir Elton John Collection, the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, and other private, corporate and public collections. He lives in Yatsugatake Nanroku, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan where he enjoys creating his work while being close to nature.