AAU Represents at 2017 Regional SPE Events

This fall, Academy of Art University photographers assembled at the Northwest and West/Southwest Society for Photographic Education (SPE) Chapter conferences. 

Northwest educators including Full-Time Faculty Marico Fayre (third from left) and Alyson Belcher (second from right).

SPE Northwest's Illuminate & Provoke took place on October 20-21 at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Keynote Speaker Richard Misrach presented his Border Cantos series, and Full-Time Faculty Alyson Belcher and Marico Fayre were in attendance.

Full-Time Faculty Kim Mowbray (left) and Katty Hoover (right) at Tahoe CoLab, the conference for West and Southwest Chapters.

MFA Alumnus J. Jason Lazarus serves as Vice Chair/Secretary for the chapter and helped organize the event. MFA Alumna Teresa Meier shared The Witness Within as part of the conference's Imagemaker Series.
 
SPE West and Southwest Chapters joined forces at Tahoe CoLab: Creativity, Community, and Collaboration, November 3 – 5 at Granlibakken, South Lake Tahoe. The conference featured Harrell Fletcher as Keynote Speaker, and Full-Time Faculty Kim Mowbray was present. Senior Faculty Katty Hoover presented Lake Como during the Imagemaker Series.

As Chair of the West Chapter, AAU alumna Amanda Dahlgren oversaw the weekend's activities.

We were happy to connect with colleagues, students, and alumni in the west, northwest and southwest regions!

What is a Landscape?

by Brian K. Edwards

Every few years I undertake an exercise to revise and revamp my web page. The process usually involves starting from scratch, rethinking the selection of images, the layout, the fonts, background colors, what contact information I should include, which profile picture I should choose…the list goes on.  Image selection usually comes last even though it probably should come first. With image selection comes the issue or arrangement and the inevitable selection of categories for these images.

As long as I have done photography, landscapes have always found their way into my repertoire and these images were always grouped under a “Landscape” moniker. Image choice was usually simple - the shot below of Gesto Bay is one of the first I would consider for such this category. This was amongst the low hanging fruit on a tree containing many images that could easily be called landscapes. After all, they were taken outdoors, included lots of trees or other flora and in some cases fauna, and their taking encompassed the normal-to-wide angle perspective that made these landscape shots look like, well, landscapes. What could be easier?

Brian K. Edwards, Gesto Bay, Isle of Skye, Scotland, May 15, 2007

This time around, it wasn’t so easy, and it still isn’t. The current version of my website (www.briankedwards.com) has no Landscape category, gallery, or portfolio, even if there might be some images scattered in other categories, galleries or portfolios that could be so categorized. I do not know how to explain this. Possible explanations? For one, maybe there just aren’t enough landscape-type images that I want to show anyone. I doubt this, since there are at least five or six (enough to constitute a category, gallery, or portfolio) that I still like, and others I have liked, so I cannot say that not including these shots is the result of some change of heart.  Second, have I crossed a precipice into a world where I care only about what the images are about and eschew such broad and perhaps anachronistic groupings including that of landscape? After all, we do live in modern times and I have read Susan Sontag (which has made me a better person, by the way). [1] This is not a bad option, but I don’t think it is the best option. My updated site includes a portrait category, so I have not moved beyond the use of more traditional (and possibly overly broad) groupings. Third, am I struggling with the notion of what a landscape is, what the notion means, and therefore what sorts of images might rightfully fall into such a category?

I think the answer lies behind door number three, but there might be a little bit of option two sprinkled in. For one, I am just not sure any more just what it means for an image to be considered a landscape, or whether images that I had previously thought of as being landscapes might better fit into some other category. This argument could easily apply to other genres like portraits (compare the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Loretta Lux, to illustrate) and even the line between color and black and white is no longer as thick and impervious as in days past even if attempts to add color to monochromatic images began soon after the invention of the daguerreotype.

Like many genres, the definition of landscape has expanded considerably since the early survey images of Timothy O’Sullivan and even since the modernist landscapes of Ansel Adams defined what a landscape image was and what a landscape was supposed to look like. The New Topographics movement certainly changed, at least for me, the meaning of landscape, as did the work of Timothy Misrach. Writings by the likes of John Beck (example, The Purloined Landscape: Photography and Power in the American West) have also influenced my thinking. [2]

Richard Misrach, Personnel Carrier Pained to Simulate School Bus, 1986 [2

Topographic photography introduced into the landscape many of the same issues that long influenced the social documentary photography of the likes of Lewis Hine and the countless shots or urban places dating back to the work of Charles Marville, who produced an extensive body of Parisian cityscapes during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. [3] John Thomson is another photographer of the same era who photographed Victorian London in a way similar to Marville. [4] What all of this work shared was an interest in how people interact with their environment and, for better or worse, how they affect that environment. Combining this with the vernacular landscape embedded in the work and writing of John Brinckeroff (J.B.) Jackson moves us quite a way from the romanticized view of landscapes embodied in centuries of landscape painting and the bulk of modernist landscape photography. [5]

Charles Marville, Rue de Constantine, ca. 1865 [4]

But along with all of these changes have been changes in my own point of view and preferences, and this alone might account for my newly minted agnosticism towards such a narrow definition of the genre. Perhaps all of this work can rightly be considered landscape, but the genre has become so broad and so encompassing that it can comprise images of great variety in both appearance and interpretation. If I were to return to the Isle of Skye (which I hope I do) would I even be interested in Gesto Bay as a subject? Perhaps my own attitudes towards what types of subjects I consider interesting, as well as the sorts of things I want to say about a particular place have changed. Under such a scenario, such a landscape-like interpretation of Gesto Bay might not even be possible since I would looking to say something else about that place or might perhaps pass it up as a subject to photograph altogether. Maybe I need to have a Landscape category, or gallery or portfolio, but maybe this time the kinds of images I would include now would be so different from what I included in the same category previously, reflecting nothing more than my own evolving sense of what this particular genre is really about.

Sources:

[1] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

[2] John Beck, The Purloined Landscape: Photography and Power in the American West, Tate Papers, No. 21, Spring 2015, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/21/the-purloined-landscape-photography-and-power-in-the-american-west

[3] Charles Marville, Rue de Constantine, ca. 1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId=%7b21968755-5ddd-4fea-81c5-000d8aaaf6b3%7d&oid=264863&pkgids=236&pg=1&rpp=4&pos=3&ft=*

[4] Peta Pixel, 19th Century London Street Photography by John Thomson, August 14, 2013, https://petapixel.com/2013/08/14/19th-century-london-street-photography-by-john-thomson/

[5] John Brinckeroff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1998.

Alumni Spotlight: Scott Borrero

An alumnus of AAU and the recent winner of Nigel Barker's Top Photographer show, Scott is a proven commercial photographer. While executing campaigns across the world, Scott has developed a well known digital personality and has amassed almost 400,000 followers on Instagram.

His photographic technique and surrealistic vision, creating wonder and purposeful distractions, make Scott's images so impactful. 

Scott's passion is large scale commercial, environmental portraiture and branded content campaigns.

Scott has worked behind and in front of the camera with major brands, including Nike, AT&T, Jeep, Toyota, SLS Hotels, Finland/Jordan Tourism and more.

Modern Stereo Photography

by Shannon Polugar, MFA Student

A modern stereograph photo by Ignacio Torres, taken with a standard DSLR camera, is actually four photographs in one

Late last month I found myself upstairs in the back of a large antique store, where a dozen or so metal filing cabinets stood containing photographs of all but the earliest of photographic types, along with baskets of photos covering the tops of the cabinets. I, however, was drawn to one particular type of photograph: the stereographs.

For a lover of old photographs, it is easy to spend half a day in a room like this, at an antique mall in Monterey, California. The stereoscope or ‘viewer’ hangs from the ceiling above the filing cabinets

I have long been fascinated by this type of photography. In the closet of my grandfather’s office were stereograph slides that he had taken of their time in Ecuador in the 1960s, along with the Grand Canyon a handful of years later. I could spend hours putting the slides into the viewer, amazed at how surreal the three-dimensional photos appeared. Whether it was these or the over 100-year-old stereograph cards I was sliding into a wood and glass viewfinder in the antique store, they all felt like I was not just viewing a moment in time, but stepping into that moment.

One photographer though has found a way to create that same stereoscopic, three-dimensional view, with the modern digital camera, and without a stereo lens. Ignacio Torres, a photographer based out of New York City but who has done extensive work in Mexico as well, created his “Stellar” series with this view in mind.

The elements of space and time within the photographs are heightened in Torres’s photographs, making one feel ‘in’ the moment rather than just viewing it flatly.

Torres describes that his intention in this series was to heighten the element of space and time, which he does by taking four individual photographs in very quick succession, and then placing those photographs together in an animated GIF to create the three-dimensional effect.

The same is done with old stereograph photos online, though it is only two images in this case. Torres’s work, adding the two additional frames, creates a much smoother look. His series also plays up the whimsical, using Photoshop in post-production to highlight the stardust (confetti), to “serve as a visual metaphor to the spatial link we share with the stars.”

While older stereographs can be viewed digitally through a similar process, they don’t appear as smooth as Torres’s work

However, unlike the two frame stereographs that can be slid into a viewfinder, Torres’s work can only exist in the digital world. The images cannot be printed and still viewed as he intended. To be viewed on a gallery wall they would need to be in a digital frame. So while the visual effect is similar, there is a disconnect with Torres’s modern stereographs with the old ones.

And I did leave the antique store a bit poorer monetarily and a bit richer in history, a handful of stereographs from 1905-1915 neatly wrapped in a paper bag, but also having these modern stereographs portably within reach, only a URL away on my phone.

http://www.1883magazine.com/arts/arts/ignacio-torres

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/page/stellar-project-images-photographer-ignacio-torres-14474643

http://cargocollective.com/ignaciotorres/Stellar

https://stereo.nypl.org/

DIY Tabletop Lightbox

Artist/designer with a starving-artist budget? Need to photograph your work for a final presentation or your portfolio, but can’t afford a “studio grade” light box? No worries—make this instead.

A Blind Photographer Helps Another Artist See

by Dianne Morton

My husband and I are involved with various organizations, all very near and dear to our hearts. Our connection to such work offers us the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life. Additionally, it gives us a chance to form real relationships, which have a lasting impact on both of our lives.

As a child, my parents were involved with Guide Dogs for the Blind (San Rafael, CA), and I grew up understanding the important work of these organizations for the visually impaired. As the owner of a “career change” dog, I often took my German Shepard, Addie, to work as a distraction on the obstacle course for guide dogs in training. Over time, I recognized that a trained guide dog offers tremendous independence and companionship. When Brian and I were dating, I was pleased to learn that his parents were involved with a similar organization called Guide Dogs of America (Sylmar, CA).

Through our involvement with Guide Dogs of America, we’ve befriended a woman who lost her vision at 35. Can you imagine that? Lori was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when she was a teenager. Although her disease was managed with the best available treatment, while sitting at her work desk one day, her vision ceased in one eye. Soon after, she lost vision in the other.

My friendship with Lori has caused me to pause. As a photographer, I can’t imagine my life without my camera, my passion. Yet, Lori and her guide dog, Carter, are content and happy, and she has an irreverent, hysterical sense of humor. As an active voice for Guide Dogs of America, Lori relishes her role of marketing, bringing awareness and support from many resources.

Nevertheless, I wonder: How does a visually impaired person see creatively?

I recently visited a bookstore and stumbled upon the book The Blind Photographer; of course, I purchased it, adding to my growing collection of photography books.

As I read and reviewed the photographs, the imagery from blind photographers worldwide captivated me. I was struck by the work and writing of one particular photographer, Evgen Bavčar (Slovenian, b. 1946):

“Photography must belong to the blind, who in their daily existence have learned to become masters of camera obscura. 

Camera obscura has existed for a long time; it is, for example, the concept of the cave in Plato’s philosophy and later the invention of the darkroom, which photographers entered blind: in the nineteenth century, the pioneers of photography would veil themselves and join the darkness in order to better control the image appearing on the sensitive plate. 

Today, the modern work runs the great danger of lacking in darkness, and one will have to seek the invisible in the quest for new aesthetic solutions. For me, photography does not only represent a medium of artistic expression; it is also a manner of reclaiming one’s right to the image, and the refusal to be another’s passive model. 

All the images that I create exist beforehand in my mind and are perceived by my third eye, that of the soul.

 Being a philosopher, I am passionate about art history. I sometimes meditate upon the following phrase: ‘The more visible the world grows, the more invisible the world shrinks’, and so the words of Kazantzakis come back to me: ‘Such a shame for our eyes of clay, which cannot attain the invisible’. But this world is here; it is, so to speak, within arm’s reach.”

Caligula’s Head, Naples | Itineraries | Date Unknown | Bavčar

Caligula’s Head, Naples | Itineraries | Date Unknown | Bavčar

Hand on Stone, Pompeii | Itineraries | Date Unknown | Bavčar

The Door of Fuzine | Itineraries | Date Unknown | Bavčar

Like my friend Lori, Bavčar was born with vision; however, he lost it before age 12 due to two repeated accidents. A few years later, he held a camera for the first time and took a photo of his first love:

“The pleasure I felt then resulted from my having robbed and fixed on a film something that did not belong to me. I secretly discovered I could possess something I could not see.”

Soon after, Bavčar went on to study history at the University of Ljubljana followed by philosophy at the Sorbonne. While embarking on his post-graduate education in Paris, Bavčar deepened his passion for photography; his work has been exhibited throughout the world.

What I find most interesting about Bavčar’s artistry is his inspirational explanation of his work. He places pictorial beauty within the context of blindness, a paradoxical juxtaposition for the sighted. Bavčar’s series Itineraries delivers beautifully ethereal images, which depict precisely what Bavčar imagines. With the original concept he envisions, Bavčar endeavors to translate his mental image to a physical record, which best represents the “work of what is imagined.”

Artist Statement—

ITINERARIES | Evgen Bavčar

I was only seven years old when my father died.
The most vivid memory I have of him is of a toy gun he made for me, as if to say to me: never stop fighting destiny.
I was still unaware that I belonged to a small nation threatened by others. How could I have realized then that
it would be the same for me and that I would need so much energy to defend my own identity?

I was a terrible child, who the teachers could hardly teach.
I especially liked technology and reading. One day a branch damaged my left eye, and I was unable to predict the great calamity which had been forewarned. For months, I observed the world with just one eye, until one day a mine detonator damaged my right eye as well. I didn't become blind immediately but little by little. It went on for months,
as if it were a long farewell to light. So, all the time I had to quickly capture the most beautiful things, images of books, colors and celestial phenomena, and to take them with me
on a voyage of no return. 

While I still detected some traces of light and color,
I was happy because I could still see. I retain a vivid memory of the moments of my farewell to the visible world.
But monochromy invaded my life, and I have to strive to retain the palette and its hues. I color the objects and the people that I touch so that the world escapes from monotony and transparency: I know a woman whose voice is so blue that she manages to paint a gray autumnal day blue.
I came across a painter who had a dark red voice,
and chance willed that he should love this color;
that gave me a dark delight. 

I sense the sun by its thermal effects, but I can make mistakes. One day something happened at a friend's home,
whose apartment I didn't know well; as I know where the window is in advance by the noise in the street, I said:
"The sun is strong today!", but I was unaware that it was
a radiator that gave us heat. We laughed together.
At the beginning of my blindness, when I took it more seriously, I used to wear very dark glasses to exaggerate
my condition; nowadays I use clear glasses to look like
an intellectual. 

In museums or in exhibitions I enjoy the presence of all
the silent gazes, the sound of steps that I perceive even
when listening to the voice of my guide, who tries to convey his own gaze to me. Sculpture, on the other hand, gives me
an immediate aesthetic feeling, insofar as I have been given permission to touch the statues, something that is not very common. To touch them is my own way of penetrating the myth of Eros and Psyche, which in every other way
I am outside. The pale reflection of the oil lamp which for
me symbolizes the world of appearances has disappeared.
The nostalgia for those inaccessible realities and the desire
to embark on the road that leads to them remains.
The intellectual nature of my perception urged me to take
my first photos one day, but without any artistic pretension. The smooth surface of the images taken by the camera do not look at me, I only have the physical proof of landscapes and people that I have seen or met. That is to say, my gaze exists only through the simulacrum of the photo that has been seen by someone else. That gaze makes me happy and induces
the images to come to life inside me. 

There is also the mystery of the human gaze that greatly interests me; in my photos, in fact, the people appear very different before the lens and before themselves.
They are different when faced with an unknown or infinite darkness. The absence of the photographer's eye is accentuated by the precarious irreversible moment of taking
a photo; that photo which by coming from a hidden gaze is transformed into a kind of double death. The people who are photographed cannot see themselves in the usual way:
that complicity between the photographer that confirms them in their narcissism is implicitly missing. 

So what is a gaze? It is perhaps the sum of all our dreams
in which we forget the nightmare, when we can look in
a different way. Besides, darkness is no more than an appearance, given that everyone's life, however dark,
is also made up of light. And in the same way as the day often breaks with birdsong, I have learnt how to distinguish
the voice of the morning from the voice of the night.

Self Portrait | Date Unknown | Bavčar

Personally, I find that understanding a blind person’s ability to photographically communicate what is imagined is impossible—and incredibly inspiring. The use of memory, past experiences, and emotions offers Bavčar a magnified way of seeing. He also graces his audiences with his capacity to create artwork against all odds and his ability to interface a fantastic view of the world.

Resources

Gooding, Mel. “CNN Style.” http://www.cnn.com/style/article/the-blind-photographer/index.html. Web. 9/27/2017.

Gooding, Mel, and Julian Rothenstein, ed. The Blind Photographer. London: Redstone Press. 2011.

O’Hagan, Sean. “The Guardian.” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/aug/20/blind-photographers-talk-about-their-work. Web. 9/30/2017

Sumitra. “Oddity Central.” http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/evgen-bavcar-the-blind-photographer.html. Web. 9/30/2017.

Walker Evans and Vernacular America

Personal Thoughts on the Current Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

by Brian Edwards

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is having an exhibition entitled Walker Evans that focuses on Evans’ interest in the vernacular. Running from September 30 to February 4, the show includes more than 300 prints of his work, a number of his paintings, postcards, and his personal scrapbook. [7] [9] Reading about this exhibition reminded me of how Walker Evans has influenced my own photographic work and perhaps even my view of the world.

I have often thought of the work of Walker Evans as a combination of social documentary and pre-topographic photography. He was one of the many Farm Service Administration (FSA) photographers that took scores of images documenting the Great Depression and influenced many of that same group of photographers. Stephen Shore has on numerous occasions cited Evans as an important influence on his own work; other photographers claiming similar influence include Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander. [10]

Walker Evans, Truck and Sign 1928-1930 [7] [9]

Another body of work that influenced some of my own has revolved around the notion of the vernacular landscape, which involves capturing the interaction between people and the landscape over time. One principal advocate of this point of view is the writing, photography, and painting of John Brinckeroff (J.B.) Jackson. [2] This movement departs from the modernist view of the landscape perhaps best represented by the work of Ansel Adams, but also departs from the romanticized view of landscapes represented by painters like John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, and JMW Turner. [8] Adams’ vision of the landscape was diametric to the vernacular view, namely, his vision of the landscape involved representing the landscape in more romantic terms and for the most part reflected a pre-Anthropocene (before the climate and environment were influenced by humans) view of how a landscape image should look. Like the New Topographics movement of the 1970s, the vernacular landscape emphasizes that very interaction. [6]

John Constable, Mill at Gillingham, Dorset, 1825-1826 [4]

What distinguished Jackson’s work from many of the New Topographic photographers is the less formal approach to image-making. The formal, objective view of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example, is clearly missing in Jackson’s images. [1] If anything, his images share more of what one would see in a collection of slides that just about any road traveler would take while on vacation, even though it’s very likely that subject matter would differ. The common thread is the lack of any attempt to romanticize the landscape.

J.B. Jackson, Collins, Hot Coffee [3]

A thread that runs through much of my own work is a sense of the vernacular, motivated in part by my interest in urban design, the economic viability of small towns, and rural landscapes. My use of tilt-shift lenses, on the other hand, reintroduces some of the formality and objectivity that we see in many of Ansel Adams’ romanticized landscapes as well as in Stephen Shore’s very unromantic cityscapes, but the subject matter is clearly more in line with a more vernacular view of the landscape. 

Brian K. Edwards, Café, Encino, New Mexico, 2017

The focus of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the vernacular side of Walker Evans’ work reflecting his own interest in the “surface of everyday life” that “highlights Evans’s [sic] fascination with American popular culture.” [7] Evans’ images of buildings, storefronts, and urban spaces are well known, as is his work documenting the people of his time, but an interesting thread that runs parallel to so much of his work is an interest in the everyday, whether it be a shot of a couple on a New York subway, or another postcard-like shot of a couple on Coney Island. This exhibition sheds a different light on one of the more important photographers of the twentieth century.

Walker Evans, Couple at Coney Island, New York, 1928 [5]

Sources

[1] Bernd and Hilla Becher, Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings, Schirmer/Mosel, 2005.

[2] John Brinckeroff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1998.

[3] John Brinckeroff Jackson, Collins, Hot Coffee, Part of the Chris Wilson Collection of J.B. Jackson American Slides, University of New Mexico University Libraries, http://libguides.unm.edu/cswr/jbjackson/conference

[4] John Constable, Mill at Gillingham, Dorset, 1825-1826, John Constable – the Complete Works, https://www.john-constable.org/the-complete-works.html?pageno=2

[5] Walker Evans, Couple at Coney Island, New York, 1928, The Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Walker Evans, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/artist/walker-evans/

[6] Claire O’Neill, New Topographics (Redux), The Picture Show, National Public Radio, June 20, 2009, http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2009/06/topographics.html

[7] PDN, Walker Evans’s Vernacular America, September 29, 2017, https://potd.pdnonline.com/2017/09/48657/#gallery-1

[8] Michael Prodger, Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and the Making of Landscape, The Guardian November 23, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/23/constable-turner-gainsborough-making-landscape

[9] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans: Exhibition, September 30, 2017 – February 4, 2018, https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/walker-evans/

[10] John Szarkowski, Walker Evans: American Photographer, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walker-Evans