Penelope Umbrico: Photography as Subject. A conversation with Kate Palmer Albers

On Thursday, March 27th, Penelope Umbrico and UA art history professor Kate Palmer Albers will discuss the artist’s photo-based installations, video, and digital media works that explore the ever-changing technologies of image making, and the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. Utilizing photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive, Umbrico navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective. Her works question the idea of the “democratization” of photography and media, where pre-scripted images, made with tools programmed to function in predetermined ways, undermine a claim to authorship, subjectivity and individuality. For Umbrico, all images within this emergent environment are evidence of something other than what they depict.