Lecture

Artifacts and Orbits—An Evening of Art & Science Inquiry

Thursday, November 9th 5:30-7pm

Join us for a multidisciplinary panel in conjunction with the current exhibition Invisible to the Eye featuring Damon Sauer, Julie Anand, Dr. Beth O’Leary, and Dr. Moriba K. Jah. Phoenix-based artist collaborators Sauer and Anand will introduce their current project featured in the exhibition, Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks, in which they photograph the remains of Cold War satellite calibration targets that were part of the first spy satellite program and then digitally render a map of orbiting satellites in the sky overhead. The project not only addresses the origins of satellite technology but also the massive information network in which we are all currently suspended and reliant upon. Dr. O’Leary, a space archeaologist and Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University   will speak to the ways in which artifacts on Earth connected with space exploration as well as the artifacts human beings distribute beyond the Earth’s surface are ripe for archaeological consideration. Dr. Jah, an astrodynamist and Associate Professor in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin  will inform us from his perspective on problems in space traffic and the long-term sustainability of space activities. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Kate Albers, Associate Professor in the UA School of Art, whose current work explores the intersection of photography, geolocational technology, and landscape.
 

Damon Sauer and Julie Anand are collaborative artists based in Phoenix, Arizona whose conceptually-driven practice explores notions of boundaries. They have been collaborating for thirteen years. Anand is Associate Professor within the Photography area of the School of Art at Arizona State University and Senior Sustainability Scholar at ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. Anand and Sauer’s current ongoing project, Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks, was selected this year for the national Sidney Zuber Award by the Phoenix Art Museum, the international Lensculture Exposure Award by curator Duan Yuting of China and the national Critical Mass Juror’s Pick by curator Peggy Sue Amison of Dubai. Exhibitions in 2017 include Broken Ground: New Directions in Land Art at the Florida State Art Museum, Totality at Oregon State University as well as the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum in Greece. Ground Truth received attention this year in Wired magazine, Hyperallergic, and Politiken (print newspaper of Denmark). The collaborative team looks forward a solo exhibition of the ongoing work at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in 2018. The project is supported this year by the Land Arts Mobile Research Center/Andrew Mellon Foundation.

https://placesjournal.org/article/skywatching/

http://www.2circles.org

Dr. Beth Laura O’Leary is currently Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University where she created the Cultural Resource Management Certificate Program. She has been a leader in the emerging field of Space Archaeology and Heritage. With a grant from NASA, she investigated the archaeological assemblage and the international heritage status of the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base site on the Moon. In 2010, she and students successfully nominated the objects and structures at the Tranquility Base site to State Register of Cultural Properties. She is a member of the World Archaeological Congress Space Heritage Task Force. The Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology and Heritage by Beth O’Leary with her co-editor Ann Darrin was published in 2009; The Archaeology and Heritage of the Human Movement into Space (with co-editor, P.J.Capelotti); and most recently Dr. O’Leary with L.Westwood and M.W. Donaldson wrote The Final Mission: Preserving NASA’s Apollo Sites. As a recognized expert in this field she has been interviewed by the international media, including among others: Smithsonian, National Geographic, NPR, New York Times, LA Times, Deutsche Radio, and many others. She has written for BBC Radio 3 and the Washington Post.

https://anthropology.nmsu.edu/anthropology-faculty/oleary/

Dr. Moriba K. Jah is currently an Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics department, Cockrell School of Engineering, at the University of Texas at Austin where he also serves as the Director of the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research In Astronautics (ASTRIA) program, focused on solving astrodynamics problems in Space Traffic, Orbital Safety, and Long-Term Sustainability of Space Activities. Dr. Jah is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). He’s also an Associate Editor for Advances in Space Research, the official journal of the Committee On Space Research (COSPAR).

https://sites.utexas.edu/moriba

Dr. Kate Palmer Albers is Associate Professor in the Art History Division, with a speciality in the History and Theory of Photography. Her book, Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (University of California Press, 2015), addresses the limits of photography's ability to narrate the past and argues that doubt and inaccessibility can generate a space for a productive uncertainty that is as culturally valuable as information and clarity. Albers’ current work focuses on the intersection of photography, geolocational technology, and landscape, and she is developing new research on photographic communication through social media. She is also interested in the role of digital technologies in art historical research and contemporary practice, as well as teaching. She organized the exhibition Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies which looked at the intersection of photography, mapping, technology, and landscape, and appeared at the Sam Lee Gallery (Los Angeles, 2009) and the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ, 2010). In 2010 she participated in the NEH Summer Institute Mapping and Art in the Americas at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

 http://art.arizona.edu/people/directory/kpalbers/

Join us on Thursday, October 26 for a public lecture and members’ reception for Wynn Bullock: Revelations. The Center is happy to host Brett Abbott, former Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography and Head of Collections at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and current Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Abbott curated the traveling Bullock retrospective and is the recipient of the 2012 Ansel Adams Fellowship from the CCP, where he did early stages of his research on the artist. The Center will also welcome Lynne Harrington-Bullock and Barbara Bullock-Wilson, children of Wynn Bullock, who will elaborate on their father’s life and work and what it was like growing up in the Bullock family.

Public Lecture
CCP Auditorium
4 – 5:30 pm
This portion of the evening is open to the public and will give the audience a chance to learn more about the current exhibition, Wynn Bullock: Revelations, from the perspective of exhibition curator Brett Abbott. Attendees will also be able to hear from Lynne Harrington-Bullock and Barbara Bullock-Wilson, children of Wynn Bullock, who will elaborate more on their father’s work and family life.

Private Members’ Reception
6 -7 pm
Members of the CCP will enjoy an exclusive reception with Brett Abbott, Lynne Harrington-Bullock and Barbara Bullock-Wilson. This unique opportunity provides members with detailed insight into each of their experiences with the exhibition and Wynn Bullock himself. Please RSVP to bap@email.arizona.edu if you wish to attend. Not a member yet? Click here and sign up today! 

Emilia Mickevicius will present a lecture titled, "Photograph/Viewer/Landscape: Revisiting the Reception of New Topographics, 1975" at 5pm, August 29th, CCP Auditorium. She is a 2017 recipient of the Photographic Arts Council of Los Angeles Fellowship from the CCP and a PhD History of Art and Architecture scholar at Brown University, Providence. Her dissertation, “Dispassionate Landscapes: Style and Spectatorship in New Topographics, 1975,” re-analyzes one of the most important photographic exhibitions of the 20th century. 

On Sunday, September 17, the Center will present a public artist’s talk by Japanese photographer Kōzō Miyoshi, in conjunction with Longer Ways to Go: Photographs of the American Road, an exhibition of photographs from the Center’s collection currently on view in the Norton Family Photography Gallery at Phoenix Art Museum. During the 1990s, while he was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Miyoshi traversed what remains of Route 66, the “Main Street of America,” creating placid, meticulously composed images with an 8 x 10 view camera. Miyoshi chose the title “Middle of the Road” to refer to his habit of standing dead-center in the road to make a photograph with his tripod-mounted camera, a gesture that reveals signs of past use in the form of tire marks, seams, and cracked pavement, while reminding us that, at least at the moment Miyoshi took the picture, no one was coming. Made soon after Route 66 was removed from the federal highway system, when local preservation efforts were just getting under way, Miyoshi’s images form a compelling document of the landmark’s transition from highway to scenic byway, from America to Americana.

Member's Print Viewing & Reception
From 2-4 pm the Center will host a Member's only Print Viewing & Reception in collaboration with the Kōzō Miyoshi public presentation. Not a member yet? Sign up here.

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Kōzō Miyoshi is a Japanese photographer whose work is in the collections of The Art Museum, Princeton University; The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The George Eastman Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Hallmark Collection, Kansas City, Missouri; Nihon University, Tokyo; and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. The Center for Creative Photography published Far East and Southwest: The Photography of Kōzō Miyoshi in 1994. In the Road, a collection of Miyoshi’s photographs of Route 66, was published by Nazraeli Press in 1999. In 2011, Miyoshi released Northeast Earthquake Disaster Tsunami 2011, a portfolio of photographs of the aftermath of the 2011 quake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s northeast coast and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. A selection of photographs from the portfolio was included in In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11, a 2015 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. No matter, the road is life.” —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

The network of roads in America is immense, and “The Road” looms even larger in American culture. The American road has always been a place of self-discovery both for its individual travelers and, through their narratives, for the country as a whole. True to form, it can move us in opposite directions. It can lead toward a future of greater standardization and bigger development or back into a nostalgic past. It has the potential to either isolate or unify its travelers. Roads cut the landscape in two, but connect the country to itself. The road is linked to the frontier myth, but roads have hastened the congestion of the once-open West. Throughout the history of cars in this country, there has been a sustained impulse to make photographs that describe the varied and contradictory texture of the road, one that continues apace. Longer Ways to Go presents photographs from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography made of, from, on, and in the more than four million miles of road that criss-cross America, over eight decades.

The gallery talk for Longer Ways to Go: Photographs of the American Road will be held in the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum. The talk is free and open to the public, but please RSVP here as seating is limited. 

While one might think that the combining of photography and death leads to mourning and melancholy (as in Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes), this presentation explores the flip side of this somber state of affairs and the return of the (humorously) repressed in the comic equation "Photography + Death = Laughter."  Beginning with Hippolyte Bayard’s prankish performance Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840), photographers have “played dead” and turned to a morbid sense of humor as a mode of comic relief.  This presentation will review a range of genres and fascinating case studies that typify this sensibility whether these images stage macabre stereographic ghosts and skeletons, the poses of Surrealist humour noir, headless photographic cut-ups, or Conceptual art pratfalls.

Biography:
Louis Kaplan is Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media at the University of Toronto.  He is recognized internationally for his innovative historical and theoretical contributions to the field of photography studies in such areas as spirit photography, photography and community, photographic humour, the New Vision, and photography theory.  His new book on Photography and Humour is published by Reaktion Books (London) and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.  He is also the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Duke, 1995), American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2005), and The Strange Case of William Mumler: Spirit Photographer (Minnesota, 2008).  Professor Kaplan has collaborated with the artist Melissa Shiff on two highly acclaimed research-creation projects in the digital humanities that utilize augmented and virtual reality -- Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project (2011-2014) and The Imaginary Jewish Homelands of I.N. Steinberg (2015-2020) supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  Professor Kaplan serves on the editorial boards of History of Photography and Journal of Photography and Culture.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Creative Photography and the University of Arizona Art History Graduate Student Association as part of their symposium titled, Magic and Mechanic: Exploring the Interior Mysteries of Art and Its Histories.

Photography and Humour will be available for purchase, and a book-signing with Dr. Kaplan will follow the Keynote Presentation. 

Image Credit: Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 1996; from Alex Webb: La Calle (Aperture/Televisa Foundation, 2016) © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Etherton Gallery

This joint public slide talk with Etherton Gallery will feature a selection of photographs from the creative couple's monographs, including Alex's new book of 30 years of work from Mexico, La Calle and Rebecca's My Dakota, an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly, as well as some of their collaborative books, including Violet Isle. They will also show some new works-in-progress. The talk will be followed by a question and answer session as well as an opportunity to purchase books by the artists.

-No RSVP-
-Free Event-

A book signing with the artists will also be available at Etherton Gallery from 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.

You are invited to join us at the Center on Friday, September 9 at 5:30 PM for a special lecture by world-renowned photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.

**Free parking available after 5pm in Lot 3039 behind CCP**

About the Photographer:

Joel-Peter Witkin has famously said of his work, “I wanted my images to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.” His grotesque, hauntingly beautiful photographs engage with history and spirituality, embodiment and mortality. Witkin creates elaborate tableaux populated with little people, amputees, hermaphrodites, the unusually-abled and the dead—a cast of characters whose sheer otherness is seductive. He draws his imagery from a wealth of literary, art historical, and mythological sources, meticulously staging scenes that reference academic painting, Surrealism, and the nineteenth-century proto-Pictorialist photographers Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustave Rejlander. Once he has photographed a scene, Witkin often spends weeks in the darkroom manipulating and printing the image by hand. At a moment in visual culture when even journalistic photographs are Photoshopped, Joel-Peter Witkin’s obsessively-realized fabrications offer their own peculiar truth.

Witkin’s work is included in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, The National Gallery, Washington, DC; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. He is the recipient of the Commandeur d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France.

This lecture is presented jointly with Etherton Gallery, in conjunction with their upcoming exhibition Shadowlands, which features the work of Alice Leora Briggs, Roger Ballen, and Joel-Peter Witkin. Shadowlands opens Saturday, September 10, with a reception from 7-10 PM.

Lecture: David Shneer "Valuing Grief"

Blockbuster photography shows like War/Photography, about the history of photography’s role in documenting war, and Faking It, which looks at photographic manipulation “before photoshop,” have riveted audiences by the thousands.  One artist appears in both, a Soviet photographer named Dmitrii Baltermants.  In this presentation, Dr. Shneer tells the story of Baltermants’s most famous photograph, titled Grief, from its wartime origins on a Nazi killing field in southern Russia to its star-studded feature role in major art exhibitions in the 21st century.  He focuses on the question of value and how what was valued during the war in an image of fascist atrocities was not the same value that the image had in the 21st century. Dr. Shneer explores the history of its circulation, exhibition, and collection as he shows how Cold War politics, the emergence of institutionalized Holocaust memory, and the rise of the art market all co-existence simultaneously, and uncomfortably, in Grief.

About the Lecturer:

David Shneer is Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Jewish Studies and 2015-2016 College Scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Dr. Shneer is also a 2016 recipient of the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for Jewish Studies and is a visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute at New York University. He blogs at the Radical Jewish Traveler. Listen to his interview for the Wexler Oral History Project at the Yiddish Book Center.  More information is available at: http://www.davidshneer.com/

Presented as part of the Etherton Gallery Lecture Series. Artist websites: Lucas Blalock | John Lehr