Lecture

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.

A panel discussion featuring Ann Simmons Myers as moderator and Melanie Walker, Teresa Engle Schirmer, and Alex Sweetman contributors.

Ann Simmons Myers is Head of the Photography Program at Pima Community College. Her career has been chronicled in more than 20 publications and her photographs are included in the collections of prominent institutions, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the High Art Museum in Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. 

Melanie Walker has been a practicing artist for over 30 years with expertise is in the area of alternative photographic processes, digital and mixed media as well as large scale photographic installations and more recently, public art. She currently teaches in the Media Arts Area at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Teresa Engle Schirmer is an acclaimed darkroom printer who created the posthumous photographs in the recent SFMoma Winogrand Exhibition.

Alex Sweetman is a photographer, writer, and instructor and is currently the director of media arts and a professor in the departments of art and art history, and in film studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Photographers Alejandra Platt-Torres and David Taylor have spent years along the U.S.-Mexico border, each separately documenting the landscape and the people. Torres’ black and white work focuses on the plight of the migrants and portraits of indigenous people while Taylor examines the dramatic increase in security apparatus along the border. They will show and discuss their work in a forum moderated by Dr. Scott Whiteford, professor at the UA Center for Latin American Studies, whose current project focuses on globalization, borders, and environmental security in Latin America.

On the Line: Border Images from two Perspectives is co-sponsored by the Center for Creative Photography and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry.

The Center for Creative Photography and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry will explore the issues surrounding water and sustainability in the desert with a panel discussion titled Water: Where Science and Art Meet on Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 5:30 p.m. in the Center’s Auditorium. The focal point of the discussion will be the Confluencenter’s highly acclaimed book Ground|Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River and photographs from CCP’s Water in the West archive collection. Confluencenter director, Dr. Javier Duran, will moderate the panel, which will include Ellen McMahon, one of the editors of the Ground|Water book and a professor of art at the UA; Dr. Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography at CCP and the Phoenix Art Museum; Dr. Gregg Garfin, deputy director for Science Translation and Outreach at the Institute of the Environment; and Edgar Cardenas, doctoral candidate at the ASU School of Sustainability.

 

Edgar Cardenas is an artist-scientist. Born in California, raised in Wisconsin, educated in New England and the Southwest, he studied Psychology at Gordon College (BA), Industrial/Organizational Psychology at University of New Haven (MA), and is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Sustainability, with one foot in the School of Art at Arizona State University. Edgar’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries as well as in scientific journals. He believes the next creative mash up should be between art and science so he works in both spaces. His photographic work explores the ecological, cultural, and technological relationships humans have with their environments. He is currently researching how collaboration dynamics between artists and scientists can lead to novel sustainability-oriented outcomes. Additionally, he is exploring how Aldo Leopold approached his work as an artist-scientist and why this integrative approach should be part of the contemporary sustainability dialogue.

Shelby Lee Adams was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky, lived and grew up in the middle part of Johnson’s Fork, in Letcher County, Kentucky. An American environmental portrait photographer and artist, he is best known for his images of Appalachian family life. Adams has photographed Appalachian families since the mid-1970s. His work in Appalachia is from an insider’s point of view. These are people he knows personally, having met many families of the Appalachian mountains as a child travelling around the area with his uncle, who was a doctor.

John Divola (1949, Los Angeles) works primarily with photography and digital imaging. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988, he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola's work has been featured in more than sixty solo exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia. His work has also been included in more than two hundred group exhibitions. Among Divola’s Awards are Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986). His recent books include Continuity (Ram Publications, 1997), Isolated Houses (Nazraeli, 2000), Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (Nazraeli, 2004), Three Acts (Aperture, 2006), and The Green of This Notebook (Nazraeli, 2009). While he has approached a broad range of subjects, Divola is currently moving through the landscape looking for the oscillating edge between the abstract and the specific.

Guest curators Rachael Arauz and Adriana Zavala will discuss the development of the exhibition and the ways in which, together, the CCP Archive and the González Rendón Archive of Lola’s work enrich what we know about the career of this great photographer. (See video at Arizona's Public Media's Arizona Connection.)

The gallery will be open for an exclusive exhibition preview from 4:30 to 5:30pm before the lecture.

Rachael Arauz is an independent curator and art historian. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in American modern art and the history of photography. Her recent exhibitions include Keith Haring: Journey of the Radiant Baby, The Shape of Abstraction, Photographing Motion: Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton, and Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your.

Adriana Zavala is a specialist in 20th-century Mexican art.  She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University and is Associate Professor at Tufts University.  She curated the exhibition Maria Izquierdo: Un Arte Nuevo for the Colección Blaisten and Mexico Beyond Its Revolution/México más allá de su revolución for the Tufts University Art Galleries.  She has authored numerous academic essays and the book Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women Gender and Representation in Mexican Art (Penn State University Press, 2010).