Special Events

Our month-long look into family photographs includes a livestream conversation with CCP’s senior photograph conservator Dana Hemmenway. Hemmenway will discuss the wide variety of photographic prints found in historic family albums, from daguerreotypes to inkjet prints. In addition to insight into the physical and chemical properties of these unique printing methods, Hemmenway will offer advice on the proper care and storage for your family photographs. Please click here to register.

Have a conservation question for Dana Hemmenway? You can send your questions and/or images of photographs with condition issues ahead of time to the CCP Education Department at ccp-education@email.arizona.edu.

Dr. Vishnu Reddy is a professor of planetary sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. An avid photographer since his childhood, Dr. Reddy combines his passion for astronomy and photography by taking photographs of the night sky through his backyard observatory and homebuilt darkroom. The members-only event will focus on a private tour of Dr. Reddy’s backyard observatory and darkroom and will end in a demonstration of making a silver print of the moon in the darkroom. The print will be raffled off to members participating in the event. Register here today! 

Did we mention Dr. Reddy is a CCP Member? We thank him for his generous contributions as a member and friend of the CCP. Not a member yet? Learn more here.

ANTI/body is a site specific installation event in multiple locations around Tucson and an emergent collaboration between the Tucson Art+Feminism Collective and local artist Natalie Brewster Nguyen.

ANTI/body is a social response to the pandemic crisis and a springboard for creation; Nguyen has invited local artists to respond to a broad spectrum of inquiries linking to the guiding theme of this year’s Art+Feminism Campaign, Art+Activism. The artists are all women/trans/non-binary/queer/POC artists whose work crosses genres and mediums. They are collectively using this moment to demonstrate the incredible adaptability and relevance of art in hard times.

All installations are intended to be enjoyed from a distance, whether in a car, on bike, or on foot. We ask that participants follow social distancing protocols put forth by CDC. The soundtrack can be played on a personal device, headphones are recommended. ANTI/body can also be experienced virtually, by viewing photos of the installations on the map and engaging with the soundtrack.

Art installations and soundtrack will launch on May 15th, 2020 at 5:00pm and be available for viewing throughout the following week, or until the elements destroy them. 

For more information about the 2020 Tucson Art+Feminism event, visit the event page on the University Libraries website. 

This Thursday at 12 o’clock noon PT, we are thrilled to host a "Virtual Brown Bag" with talks by Morgan Byrd and Taylor Kowgios, both graduate students in UArizona's Art History division. Byrd and Kowgios will present their final research projects for Dr. Jeehey Kim's graduate seminar "Vernacular Photographies," an expansive conversation about photography made for purposes other than fine art. This event is free and open to the public via Zoom here. 

12:00PT - Welcome

12:05 - 12:25 - Morgan Byrd, "Gris-Gris: How Voodoo Photographs Function as Representations of New Orleans"

12:25 - 12:45 - Taylor Kowgios, "Control of the Narrative: The Role of the Photographic Archive in Nazi Germany"

12:45 - 1PT - Q&A with Dr. Jeehey Kim, Morgan Byrd, and Taylor Kowgios 

About Morgan Byrd:

Morgan Byrd is an MA Candidate in Art History with a focus in the History of Photography at the University of Arizona. After receiving her BFA in Photography from Georgia State University in 2015, she worked for many organizations such as ART PAPERS Magazine, The Do Good Fund Photography Collection, the Atlanta Contemporary, and Marcia Wood Gallery. She has also curated several exhibitions including SPECTER, exploring the representation of death in art, at ArtLab Gallery at Columbus State University, and Creature of What You Are, the inaugural exhibition at Day & Nights Projects in Atlanta, GA. Most recently, she co-curated FEMME, an all-female exhibition in Tucson, AZ. 

About Taylor Kowgios:

Taylor Kowgios is an Art History Masters student at the University of Arizona and she is the recipient of the Graduate Assistantship in Art History and the Ellwood C. Parry III Endowed Award in Art History. Kowgios received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Lafayette College in English Literature and Art with a concentration in Photography and Art History. Graduating Summa Cum Laude, she fulfilled her undergraduate thesis in Art History while also completing an (unofficial) Studio Photography thesis. At Lafayette College, she was the recipient of the Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship in Studio Art, the Dorian Scholarship in Art History, and the Charles A. Dana Foundation Scholarship for merit-based achievement. 

About Dr. Jeehey Kim:

Jeehey Kim's research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim is currently working on two book projects: Imagining Korea through Photography, on the history of photography in Korea, and Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia. She also has been writing articles on vernacular photographic practices as well as on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and to gender politics in East Asia. 

As a curator, Kim has organized exhibitions such as the recent “Pyongyang Bookstore,” at Seoul Metropolitan Library, which presented North Korean artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation on funerary portrait photography in East Asia. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.

In the interest of the health and welfare of our patrons, staff, faculty, and students, the Center will be closed through the end of the year. This includes our galleries as well as our in-person programs, events, and research spaces. We believe this is a responsible and ethical step, and we look forward to coming together again as a community when the time is right. 

This decision was made in line with public health guidelines regarding COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus), as well as appropriate procedures determined by the University of Arizona. The University of Arizona has established a dedicated website that provides updates and resources, and we encourage you to refer to that site for ongoing information.

During the time when our physical doors are closed, we look forward to connecting with you virtually, through our website, social media, and our new app, CCP Interactive. Our staff is excited to offer you new and engaging content through these channels over the next months.

For information about other Arizona Arts closures, please visit their website.

We apologize for any inconvenience and look forward to seeing you here at the CCP again soon.

Join us online from 1:00-4:00pm on Friday, March 27th, 2020 for a virtual kickoff of Tucson’s Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. This kickoff event marks the start of a month-long, community-wide effort towards editing Wikipedia pages concerning womxn and non-binary artists, makers, poets, photographers. Our collective goal is to improve coverage of womxn, non-binary and femme-identified people and the arts on Wikipedia and encourage diverse editorship. The kickoff event will include tutorials for the beginner Wikipedian, lightning talks and collaborative group editing. People of all gender identities and expressions are invited to participate, with a special welcome to womxn, non-binary, and femme people. This event is free and open to the general public as well as the University of Arizona community and runs from March 27th through April 30th, 2020.

Editors who register before or during the on-going event will have the opportunity to connect with other editors and get support throughout the month as well as attend an in-person keynote presentation and performance by local artist and activist, Natalie Brewster Nguyen. Food will be provided at the family-friendly celebratory event, to be scheduled at a later date.

This event is generously sponsored and co-hosted by CATalyst Studios, the Center for Creative Photography, the Poetry Center, the Department of History, the Public History Collaborative, and the Wikimedia Foundation, making it free and open to the general public as well as the University of Arizona community.

Register for free here. 

Tucson Festival of Books has been cancelled. 

Visit the Center for Creative Photography at Tucson Festival of Books! Chief Curator Rebecca Senf will give a talk on her new book, Making A Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams on March 15 at 2:30pm as part of the presentation National Parks Experience: A Picture of Preservation, with Frank Ruggles and Jon Waterman, and will sign books after the talk. 

The Center will have a booth throughout the weekend with copies of Making a Photographer for purchase. Rebecca Senf will sign books at the CCP booth on March 14 from 10am to noon and March 15 from 11am to noon.

Additionally, make your way down to University Ave and surrounding areas for a David Hume Kennerly outdoor pop-up exhibition co-presented by The Marshall Foundation and Main Gate Square. 

Marshall Foundation, established in 1930 by Louise Marshall, seeks to enhance the lives of the citizens of Tucson, AZ and Pima County through its support of charitable and educational institutions. The Foundation focuses its community giving on early childhood through undergraduate education and supportive wrap-around social services to aid underserved populations in attaining education. We also fund projects, programs and scholarships at the University of Arizona, including post-secondary levels.

Join us for an exclusive sneak peek of the new Heritage Gallery exhibition Ansel Adams: Signature Style before the Center hosts more than 1,000 guests during our Ansel Adams birthday weekend. Walk through the exhibition during the installation process with Chief Curator Becky Senf. 

RSVP to dillardd@ccp.arizona.edu.

This is a Director's Circle exclusive event. Find information about joining the Director's Circle here.

5:30pm Members-only Curatorial Tour of The Qualities of LIGHT

The Center for Creative Photography has built a research exhibition about the 1970s/1980s New York City photography gallery LIGHT, and raises questions about our contemporary connections to photography’s histories. On this curator-led exhibition tour for CCP members at 5:30pm, Drs. Rebecca Senf and Meg Jackson Fox dive deep into the themes and materials of the exhibition, the artists included and the discoveries made, and the transformation of the Heritage Gallery into the LIGHT Lab. Then stay for the film screening and print viewing that extends the sight line of the creative processes and critical histories found in the exhibition. Space is limited for this portion of the event - please RSVP to ccp-events@email.arizona.edu.

6:15pm - 7:30pm Public Film Screening and Print Viewing

At 6:15pm in the CCP Auditorium, you will not want to miss the first public screening of the new documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland that combines archival documents, contemporary interviews, and historic footage to explore the significance and impact of LIGHT Gallery. The screening will be followed by a print viewing of additional artists who showed with LIGHT, drawn from the CCP collection.

The curatorial tour is for members only, and the film screening and print viewing are free and open to the public.

For more information on the postponement of this lecture series, click here. 

Photography moves nimbly across the spectrum of lived experience. So much of how we identify—our physical appearance, social connections, surrounding environment, political affiliations, familial relationships—is communicated through a photograph. As it rapidly becomes astoundingly ubiquitous, photography attends to the popular need to see, to stabilize, and to make sense of our selves and one another. This need can power photographs to deliver radical, unexpected ways of being and thinking. Paradoxically, the same need can flatten the complexity of our stories and our selves. How do we avoid becoming lost in a sea of our own images?

The CCP’s Spring Lecture Series will bring together artists and scholars for an extended conversation on the way in which photography is entangled with the human self. How has photography shaped self-perception? Can visual representations be attentive to the flux and infiniteness of our shifting identities? How do photographs participate as a meaning-making enterprise, and do visibility, and hyper-visibility, reveal or conceal our self? What roles do self-portraits and selfies play in a global, contemporary society?

This multi-part series will run on the following dates:

• March 19 with Lev Manovich- POSTPONED
• March 26 with Sama Alshaibi and Deb Willis- POSTPONED
• April 9 with Sybil Venegas- POSTPONED
• April 17 with Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie- POSTPONED