AMAM Lecture series

Wednesday, September 29, 5 pm—Hallock Auditorium, Lewis Center for Environmental Studies

Trevor Paglen, Photography and the Creation of the World

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines. His visual work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Andy Warhol Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, Aperture, and Art Forum. He is the author of four books: Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (2006), I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (2007), Blank Spots on a Map (2009), and Invisible (forthcoming August 30, 2010). Paglen holds a B.A. from UC Berkkeley, an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley. He currently resides in Oakland, California and New York City.

Tuesday, October 5, 5 pm—Hallock Auditorium, Lewis Center for Environmental Studies

Andy Grundberg, Culture Wars Revisited: Mapplethorpe, Photography, Pornography and the Real

Andy Grundberg is a curator, teacher, arts consultant and former New York Times critic who has been involved with photography and art for more than twenty-five years. Among the major exhibitions he has organized are Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946 (1987), Points of Entry: Tracing Cultures (1996), Ansel Adams: A Legacy (1997), and In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places (2001). His books include Alexey Brodovitch (1989), Mike and Doug Starn (1990), and The Crisis of the Real (1999), a collection of essays, which examine the notion that photography both reflects and helps shape the contemporary art world. Grundberg is currently the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and the Chair of Photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C.

Monday, October 11, 5 pm—Classroom 1, Allen Art Building

Mark Levitch, Filling the Void: The Culture of Photography in Great War France

Mark Levitch holds a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history from the University of Pennsylvania. Previously an intelligence analyst at the State Department, Levitch works as a researcher and writer at the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He is also the author of Pantheon De La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War (2006), the first historical and scholarly exploration of the Pantheon. Oberlin’s Professor of History Leonard Smith writes: “Levitch’s fine archaeology of the Pantheon provides a great service to historians of the memory of the Great War.” Levitch combines cultural history, art history and material culture studies to trace the changing reception of traditional art in the new age of mechanical media.

Thursday, October 14, 5 pm—Hallock Auditorium, Lewis Center for Environmental Studies

David Odo, Reframed Meanings: Early Photography of Japan as Souvenir/Science

David Odo is the Bradley Assistant Curator of Academic Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery. He previously taught in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Odo received his D.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and has held numerous research fellowships, including appointments at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Freer/Sackler Galleries, Harvard University, and the University of Tokyo. He has edited, curated and published work on early Japanese and Asian photography. His most recent publications are Unknown Japan: Reconsidering Early Photographs, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008) and “Expeditionary Photographs of the Ogasawara Islands, 1875-76” (in History of Photography, 2009).