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).

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard's death in 1972, a week away from his 47th birthday, came at the height of the "photo boom," a period of growth and ferment in photography in the United States which paralleled the political and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time of ambition, not reflection, a time for writing resumés, not thoughtful and inclusive histories; in the contest of reputation, dying in 1972 meant leaving the race early. It was left to friends and colleagues to complete an Aperture monograph on Meatyard and carry through with the publication of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (1974) which he had laid out and sequenced before his death. He was from Normal, Illinois.

While he lived Meatyard's work was shown and collected by major museums, published in important art magazines, and regarded by his peers as among the most original and disturbing imagery ever created with a camera. He exhibited with such well-known and diverse photographers as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and Eikoh Hosoe. But by the late 1970s, his photographs seemed consigned to appear mainly in exhibitions of "southern" art. In the last decade, however, thanks in part to European critics (who since at least the time of De Tocqueville have forged insights into American culture), Meatyard's work has reemerged, and the depth of its genius and its contributions to photography have begun to be understood and appreciated. In a sense Meatyard suffered a fate common to artists who are very much of but also very far ahead of their time. Everything about his life and his art ran counter to the usual and expected patterns. He was an optician, happily married, a father of three, president of the Parent-Teacher Association, and coach of a boy's baseball team. He lived in Lexington, Kentucky, far from the urban centers most associated with serious art. His images had nothing to do with the gritty "street photography" of the east coast or the romantic view camera realism of the west coast. His best known images were populated with dolls and masks, with family, friends and neighbors pictured in abandoned buildings or in ordinary suburban backyards.

Wikipedia

More images from Eastman House
Master of Photography




Ralph Eugene Meatyard 'The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater'



Lucybelle with her bearded brother-in-law



Lucybelle w/ Bi-polar friend



Lucybelle Crater and fatherly friend

Exactitudes

From Exactitudes
Thanks Sophia for turning me on to this site

Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 13 years. Rotterdam's heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in cities abroad.

They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

EJ's Visiting Artist Justine Kurland.Thursday, September 18th

Justine will lecture on her work Thursday, September 18th in Classroom 1 @ 4-30pm