Lecture

In March 1975, Harold Jones was appointed first Director of the Center for Creative Photography. Using news clippings, snapshots, and his own recollections, Jones will present his account of the first years at the Center. (See video)

After his tenure as founding Director of the Center, Jones went on to establish the Photography Program at the University of Arizona Department of Art, where he taught for the next 30 years. Presently, he is Professor Emeritus and, since May 2005, he has been the volunteer archive assistant and coordinator of the Voices of Photography oral history project at the Center. Jones continues to be a constant student and practitioner of photography.

Alice Sachs Zimet, President, Arts + Business Partners (New York City), is a long time collector of fine art photography. She is a member of the Collections Committee of the Harvard Art Museums, the Board of the Magnum Foundation, and the International Center of Photography's Acquisitions Committee.

Susan Meiselas, a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, has published her work in the pages of Time, The New York Times, Life, and Paris Match. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia, and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

In the 1990s, after seeing the exhumation of mass graves in northern Iraq, the result of Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1987 and 1988, she began to gather every scrap of visual evidence—documents, family pictures, maps, personal stories—to build a public archive of the history of the displaced Kurdish people. From a book project and an exhibition, it developed into a website, akaKurdistan.com, an expanding visual memory bank driven by the momentum of its contributors.

Co-sponsored by the University of Arizona School of Art’s Visiting Artists, Scholars and Exhibitions (VASE) Program, Susan will present two seminal projects: Nicaragua and Kurdistan. Her work in Nicaragua spans 25 years, from the popular insurrection to a film that rediscovers the people in her photographs to an installation that brought images back to the landscape where they were first made. The Kurdistan project evolved from documenting the evidence of genocide and exile of the Kurdish people, to gathering a visual history that portrayed their desire for a homeland. Both bodies of work will be shown as they were presented in magazines, books and exhibition form.

Kenneth D. Allan’s research focuses on the rise of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and has included the work and influence of Wallace Berman. A central figure in development of the postwar Los Angeles art world as the editor of the journal Semina, Berman’s work spanned the media of photography, collage, assemblage sculpture, and film. This talk will consider how his interest in the history of radio technology, Jewish mysticism and ideas of transmission and reception come together in his later work with stones and Hebrew lettering inspired by a prized 1923 book in his library, The Story of Modern Science Vol. IX: Radio-Mastery of the Ether. Kenneth Allan is Assistant Professor of Art History at Seattle University and received his MA and PhD from University of Chicago. His recent publications include essays for the Getty Museum catalog, Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980.

Claudia Bohn-Spector will discuss the CCP exhibition, Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976, that she co-curated with Sam Mellon. Claudia Bohn-Spector is an independent scholar and curator in Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Munich, Germany. A specialist in American art and culture, she has curated numerous fine art exhibitions, including a critically acclaimed survey of Los Angeles photography at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, entitled This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs. With Sam Mellon, she is currently working on a book-length study entitled WRONG: Rules and Irreverence in American Art, 1945 to 1975, for publication in 2013.

Luke Batten, Director of the Robert Heinecken Trust, will discuss the editing of a new monograph published by Riding House detailing Heinecken's artistic output from 1957-1997. The monograph, Robert Heinecken, expands our knowledge of his artistic practice by including several unpublished works from the 1950's and reassembled magazines created in the 1990's. The focus of the discussion will concentrate on Heinecken's penchant for experimenting with photographic processes and materials. Batten is Associate Professor of Photography at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois. He received his MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.