Lecture

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).

 

Jessica S. McDonald will speak with photographer, curator, and educator Nathan Lyons about his career and role in the expansion of American photography. As a curator, theorist, educator, artist, and advocate, Nathan Lyons has played a central role in the expansion of photography over the last five decades. After producing seminal exhibitions and publications as curator at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s, he founded the Visual Studies Workshop, an independent arts organization where his innovative programs trained a new generation of photographers, critics, curators, and historians. (See video.)

McDonald is Chief Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and formerly held curatorial posts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. She is the editor of Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews (UT Press, 2012), which provides the first comprehensive overview of Lyons's career as one of the most important voices in American photography. The book will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

The Center for Creative Photography will be hosting a lecture and slideshow presented by famed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. A print viewing of selected new works by Joel-Peter will follow the lecture.

Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society—human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynies, carcasses, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists, and “any living myth… anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.” His fascination with other people's physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity. His constant reference to paintings from art history, including the works of Bosch, Goya, Velasquez, Miro, Botticelli and Picasso are testaments to his need to create a new history for himself. By using imagery and symbols from the past, Witkin celebrates our history while constantly redefining its present day context. (from Photography-Now.net)

Since 2002, Sam Stephenson has been the director of The Jazz Loft Project (JLP) at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has studied the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith since 1997. His first book, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project was published by W.W. Norton/CDS in 2001. In 2009, Alfred A. Knopf published his book, The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965.  Currently he is writing a biography of Smith entitled Gene Smith’s Sink, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Since 1997, Stephenson has conducted more than 500 oral history interviews, revealing an underground story of jazz and post-War arts unpreserved in the iconography. He co-produced the Jazz Loft Project Radio Series with Sara Fishko and WNYC: New York Public Radio. Stephenson is currently the 2012-13 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Professor of Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. (See presentation video.)

Sy Johnson is a Jazz Arranger, Orchestrator, Pianist, Writer and Photographer. He has worked with Charles Mingus, Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra, Joe Williams, and Elvis Costello, among others. His Mingus arrangements are played by The Mingus Big Band, Mingus Orchestra, published by Hal Leonard, and performed around the world. His collaboration with Charles Mingus on “Let My Children Hear Music” is a Twentieth Century Classic.

Johnson teaches Jazz Arranging and Theory at NYU, and his famed Great American Songbook class at Turtle Bay Music School. His Miles Davis interview is published in the Smithsonian “Miles Davis Reader.” Mr. Johnson’s Jazz photographs are collected in his “Jazz” monograph, published in 2010. During the 50s and 60s, he played with and also photographed many of the musicians in the Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York’s Flower District made famous by the photographs and tapes of W. Eugene Smith.

Watch a video of Sy Johnson's presentation at the Center on February 7, 2013.