Lecture

On Thursday May 1st artist Rosalind Fox Solomon will speak about how her life experience animates her work. Solomon will discuss sources of the internal, visual language that puts her in touch with her subjects. She will speak of about her personal history and why at age 38, she began her life as an artist and photographer, revealing what led her to examine relationships and ritual; survival and struggle. Throughout her lecture, Solomon will share images, beginning with her earliest pictures in the American South and ending with a preview of her recent photographs from Israel and the West Bank which will be exhibited in Prague in September. THEM, a book of Solomon’s photographs interspersed with fragmented texts, will be published by MACK in late May. Solomon’s images continue to be widely published and exhibited around the world.  In 2005, Solomon began to organize her extensive archive which came to the Center for Creative Photography in 2007. The Rosalind Solomon Archive contains a key set of over 1000 fine prints, unique books, and other art works, which together with Solomon’s original negatives, transparencies, personal papers, letters, business files, scrapbooks, video, audio tapes and other documentation chronicle her long and productive career. Selections from this archive are included in the exhibition The Process and The Page: Developing Photographic Books currently on view at the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum (through August 17th, 2014). *Meet Solomon on Friday May 2nd during our Photo Friday

Co-sponsored by the CCP in collaboration with the School of Art and the Institute of the Environment: Antarctica and the Arctic are poignant markers of the impact of climate change in the 21st Century. While there is a growing awareness of the fragility of these environments, photography continues to project an image of heroic untouched wilderness that is often unwittingly informed by 19th and 20th century European literary narratives and visual conventions. Anne Noble is a photographer and curator whose work spans still and moving image, installation and international curatorial commissions. On Friday April 25th, Noble will discuss the development of her series of Antarctic photographic projects that critically engage with heroic age histories and narratives of land, place, and environment. Noble will also discuss her recent work that explores the relationship between people and bees, in which she collaborates with scientists to create projects that incorporate the perspectives of both art and science within an aesthetic framework.  In 2003 Noble was awarded the Order of Merit for services to photography in New Zealand.  In 2009 she was a recipient of the New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate Award and was awarded the Massey University individual research medal.  Appointed Distinguished Professor of Fine Art at Massey University, Wellington in 2013, Noble is a PhD supervisor and mentors and supervises MFA students. 

In her first Center of Creative Photography artist talk since joining the Photography faculty at the School of Art (University of Arizona) in 2006, multi-media artist and Associate Professor Sama Alshaibi will discuss the major themes of her work. Her evolution as an artist concerned with the body’s complicated relationship to land through a compromised nationalistic lens has moved towards universal spaces of conflict. Connecting borders, bodies and site through allegorical devices and a variety of media (through video, installation, sculpture, photography and social media platforms), Alshaibi’s work suggests the repeated and recycled history of domination, power and control. Alshaibi’s talk will also reflect upon her significant career successes over the past year: her participation at the 55th Venice Biennial and FotoFest 2014 Biennial, the upcoming new work in the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, her soon to be published monograph with Aperture Foundation as well as being awarded University of Arizona’s 1885 Distinguished Scholar title and grant, her third major teaching award in her years at University of Arizona. 

In this presentation visual artist and writer Rebecca Najdowski will discuss how both the physical and conceptual terrains of the desert come to the surface in her artwork. This manifests in color analogue photograms, video, installation, and augmented reality interventions. In her practice she explores the potential of expanding photographic logic into other mediums through the creation of light installations and the engagement with materiality and limits of representation of photography and video. Najdowski uses the desert as a site to address notions of landscape, the sublime, phenomenology, perception, and the shifting territories of the intangible and the concrete. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona and the Artist Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. 

Thursday, March 27, 2014 at 5:30pm: Penelope Umbrico, Photography as Subject. A Conversation with Kate Palmer Albers

 

Tuesday, April 15, 2014 at 5:30pm: Rebecca Najdowski, Desert Pictures

 

Tuesday, April 22, 2014 at 5:30pm: Sama Alshaibi, Sand Rushes In - the desert, the border, the body in the work of Sama Alshaibi

 

Friday, April 25, 2015: Anne Noble, In Search of an Ecological Sublime   *This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Creative Photography in collaboration with the School of Art and the Institute of the Environment

 

Thursday, May 1, 2014 at 5:30pm: Rosalind Solomon, Jumping Off Place: How My Life Animates My Work

 

 

All artist talks are free, open to the public, and begin at 5:30pm in the Center for Creative Photography Auditorium

 

On Thursday, March 27th, Penelope Umbrico and UA art history professor Kate Palmer Albers will discuss the artist’s photo-based installations, video, and digital media works that explore the ever-changing technologies of image making, and the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. Utilizing photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive, Umbrico navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective. Her works question the idea of the “democratization” of photography and media, where pre-scripted images, made with tools programmed to function in predetermined ways, undermine a claim to authorship, subjectivity and individuality. For Umbrico, all images within this emergent environment are evidence of something other than what they depict.

On Thursday, February 20, UA photo professor Frank Gohlke will give a talk about his current project, a study of wild apple forests in Kazakhstan, funded by a Fulbright Scholar Research Grant. Gohlke’s apple passion dates back 40 years to a commencement address delivered by the late John Szarkowski to the graduating class of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Gohlke’s fascination grew during a three-year stay in Middlebury, Vermont, where he first experienced apple cider fresh from a press. "Apples" by Frank Browning (North Point Press, 1998), introduced Gohlke to the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan, from which domesticated apples grown across the world are derived.

Gohlke’s lecture will include photographs of earlier projects that presage aspects of the Kazakhstan work, and a group of images made since December 2013 in the first stage of the current project.

Center for Creative Photography Archive photographer Charles Harbutt, subject of the current exhibition, will speak about his work and life in photography with independent curator Trudy Wilner Stack and photographer, editor, and educator, Joan Liftin. The three, colleagues for over thirty years, recently worked together on Harbutt’s retrospective book, Departures and Arrivals, the occasion for and centerpiece of the exhibition on view at CCP. They will discuss their thoughts on photography in the context of Harbutt’s long career as photojournalist, personal documentarian, and teacher. The evening will include a presentation by Harbutt of his most recent project, made in 2013. The Conversation will also consider the nature of photography itself, its practice and its presentation in exhibitions and publications, and the CCP Charles Harbutt Archive, established in 1997 when Wilner Stack was CCP Curator.

Charles Harbutt was a key chronicler of the 1960s and 70s as a photojournalist working mostly through Magnum Photos (where he twice served as president). His work appeared in many magazines in Europe, Japan and the United States. Since 1980, he has pursued a more personal approach to the documentary, moving from the big story concerns of journalism to the realm of the everyday. That transition coincided with his wide influence as an educator. Harbutt has been a guest artist at the Rhode Island School of Design, MIT, the Art Institute of Chicago, and faculty at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and Bard College. In 1999, he was appointed an associate professor at Parsons, The New School for Design. His work is widely collected and exhibited by museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Beaubourg, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris. He is represented by the Peter Fetterman Gallery, in Santa Monica, CA. In 1997, his negatives, master prints and archive materials were acquired by the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Major recent solo exhibitions of his work were presented in New York City, and France, Mexico, and Turkey. Included in countless publications, Harbutt’s own books include Departures and Arrivals, Progreso, Charles Harbutt: I Grandi Fotografi and Travelog.

Joan Liftin has been a photo editor and photographer for more than 35 years.  She began as a writer for the United Nations in 1970, later becoming UNICEF’S picture editor and chief photographer.  In 1975, she became Magnum Photo’s Director of the Library.  In l981, she joined with three colleagues to found Archive

Pictures, an international photo agency, and in 1988 became Director of the International Center of Photography’s documentary education program.  She has worked throughout her career as a free-lance photographer, editor, teacher and curator. Her photography can be found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, CCP, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others. Books of her own photography are Drive-ins and Runaway, and among the many books she picture edited are Falkland Road by Mary Ellen Mark, Magnum’s Paris, My Family & Other Strangers by Naomi Savage, Inheritance by Andrea Stern, and Melting Point by Jeff Jacobson. 

Trudy Wilner Stack is a curator, writer and editor who has organized and consulted on photography, contemporary art, and cultural projects for over 25 years. For a decade she was curator at the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, and earlier held curatorial positions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, National Museum of American Jewish History, and the City of Philadelphia. Her books include Winogrand 1964, Christenberry: Reconstruction, Art Museum, Sea Change, as well as numerous contributions to other publications. Wilner Stack is the curator of dozens of historical and contemporary exhibitions, with an emphasis on post-1945 American photography. Her work has been supported by a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and many more.

Andy Grundberg, associate provost of the Corcoran School of Art and Design, is an art critic, curator, and educator with over 25 years of experience specializing in writing about photography and video within contemporary art. His essays and articles for the New York Times and other publications are collected in Crisis of the Real (Aperture).

In celebration of the 96th anniversary of Todd’s birth, the Center for Creative Photography declares Wednesday, September 25, Todd Walker Day!

11:00am and 4:00pm
Gallery Talk
Melanie Walker, Todd’s daughter and Associate Professor, IMAP and Photography, University of Colorado at Boulder

Todd Walker was an American photographer, printmaker and creator of artists’ books who is known for his manipulated images and for his use of offset lithography to produce individual prints and limited-edition books of his work.

Walker began teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1966. His interest in creative photographic processes brought him to the attention of Robert Heinecken and Robert W. Fichter at UCLA, and the three co-taught classes for a brief time. In 1970, Walker accepted a one-year teaching position at the University of Florida. There he worked with photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Douglas Prince as well as printmaker Ken Kerslake, who was at that time using photo-etching techniques in intaglio printmaking. Walker taught a photo-printmaking class and a silkscreen class. In an interview in the late 1970s, Walker said, “The contact with the ideas of the printmaker have greatly altered my attitudes toward photography, and how each discipline deals with an image.” Seven years later, he moved to Tucson and taught at the University of Arizona before retiring in 1985.

While in Arizona, Walker began working with some of the first Apple computers, and he used his technical skills to create some early 3-D images of his work and to create a book in which the text was mostly generated by the computer (Enthusiasm Strengthens, 1987). According to his daughter, Walker never used Photoshop or other commercial imaging software. He wrote his own computer programs and later made use of software primarily designed for cartography. With these techniques he was able to create digital works that blurred, inverted, and obscured the original image, making it into an expressive rather than detailed representation of reality.