Lecture

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.

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.