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APRIL 2014
Center for Creative Photography | FOCAL POINT
1030 North Olive Road, Tucson, Arizona, 85721 • (520) 621-7968 • www.creativephotography.org
Letter from the Director
April 2014
I am delighted to announce that the Center for Creative Photography has just learned that it is a newly elected member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History—known as ARIAH—in recognition of our collections and the Center’s research fellowship program that offers short-term residential awards to scholars undertaking research related to photography. Other ARIAH member institutions include the American Academy in Rome, Archives of American Art, the Drawings Institute at the Morgan Library and Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, the Huntington Library, and Getty Research Institute. 

The Center’s annual research fellowship awards support academic scholars, curators, and graduate students from around the world, enabling them to travel to the Center for concentrated periods of time devoted to in-depth research using the Center’s Collections. Later in this newsletter you can read about the recipients of this year’s fellowships, whose applications were reviewed by a committee comprised of Center staff and University of Arizona faculty.

I am very pleased to announce two new fellowships that will be available in the next round of awards:

  • Photographic Arts Council/Los Angeles (PAC/LA) Research Fellowship to support research at CCP in the history of photography. 
  • Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship to support: research at CCP by curators, writers, and researchers investigating the life and work of Kenneth J. Botto; photographers working to incorporate set-up, collage, or constructed imagery; or photographers whose work is a critical comment on political, social, and/or art historical issues in society.

The PAC/LA Research Fellowship is supported by a gift from the Photographic Arts Council/Los Angeles, an independent, non-profit organization based in Los Angeles that fosters individual and community-wide appreciation of the photographic arts.  The Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship is supported by a gift from the artist Ken Botto (1937-2008) that was accompanied by a collection of his photographs and archive material. Botto is best known for his staged, intricate photographic tableaux featuring found objects from his extraordinary private collection of antique toys, models, postcards and artifacts. Botto's creations explored societal transformations in progress and commented on contemporary political and cultural issues. His work was included in the 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.  

These two new fellowships bring the total fellowships available to seven. The deadline to apply for next year’s fellowships is January 15, 2015.

Please visit the research fellowship webpage for more information about the other fellowships (please note: we are in the process of updating the website to add the PAC/LA and Botto fellowships!). 

Katharine Martinez, PhD, Director

CCP EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

Charles Harbutt, Departures and Arrivals
November 8, 2013 – June 1, 2014

Departures and Arrivals, the Center for Creative Photography's celebration of Charles Harbutt’s photographic work, will continue on exhibition through June 1, 2014.
Ansel Adams, Self-Portrait in Victorian Mirror, Atherton, California, 1936. Collection Center for Creative Photography ©The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

April Photo Friday: Selfie
Friday, April 4, 2014 - 11:30am to 3:30pm
Volkerding Print Viewing Room
Free and open to the public
The “selfie”—which Urban Dictionary defines as “a picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website—is everywhere today. From Facebook to the Oscars, everyone is snapping pictures of themselves yet the selfie is not a new idea. People have been fascinated with producing images of themselves since the invention of photography in the 1800s. The April 4, 2014 Photo Friday at the Center for Creative Photography presents a variety of self-portraits by artists in the Center’s fine art photography collection.

Special guided exhibition tours of Charles Harbutt, Departures and Arrivals are available during every Photo Friday at 10:30am and 12:30pm. Please meet in the lobby for these 30-40 minute highlight tours with Cass Fey, Curator of Education.
Rebecca Najdowski, Desert Pictures series, 2013. C-print photogram, 11 x 14" 
© Rebecca Najdowski

Rebecca Najdowski: Desert Pictures
Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 5:30pm
Center for Creative Photography Auditorium
On Tuesday, April 15th visual artist and writer Rebecca Najdowski will discuss how both the physical and conceptual terrains of the desert come to the surface in her artwork. These manifest in color analogue photograms, video, installation, and augmented reality interventions. In her practice she explores the potential of expanding photographic logic into other mediums through the creation of light installations and the engagement with materiality and limits of representation of photography and video. Najdowski uses the desert as a site to address notions of landscape, the sublime, phenomenology, perception, and the shifting territories of the intangible and the concrete. Rebecca Najdowski is currently a Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona and the Artist Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography.   
All artist lectures at the CCP are free and open to the public. For a complete list of upcoming public programs  CLICK HERE
Sama Alshaibi, from Silsila, multi media installation, 2014. Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery
Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In: the desert, the border, the body in the work of Sama Alshaibi
Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - 5:30pm
Center for Creative Photography Auditorium
On Tuesday, April 22nd multi-media artist and University of Arizona Associate Professor Sama Alshaibi will discuss her evolution as an artist concerned with the body’s complicated relationship to land through a compromised nationalistic lens, having now moved towards universal spaces of conflict. Connecting borders, bodies and site through allegorical devices and a variety of media, Alshaibi’s work suggests the repeated and recycled history of domination, power and control. Working in video, installation, sculpture, photography and social media platforms, Alshaibi’s talk will also reflect upon her significant career successes over the past year: her participation at the 55th Venice Biennial and FotoFest 2014 Biennial, the upcoming new work in the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, her soon to be published monograph with Aperture Foundation as well as being awarded University of Arizona’s 1885 Distinguished Scholar title and grant—her third major teaching award in her eight years at the University of Arizona.  

Anne Noble, Piss Poles #1-#6, Antarctica, 2008

Anne Noble: In Search of an Ecological Sublime
Friday, April 25, 2014 - 5:30pm
Center for Creative Photography Auditorium
Co-sponsored by the CCP in collaboration with the School of Art and the Institute of the Environment: Anne Noble is a photographer whose work spans still and moving image, installation and international curatorial commissions. Noble is a Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand who is in the United States this year as a Fulbright Senior Scholar based at Columbia College Chicago as their 2014 International Artist in Residence.  On Friday April 25th, Noble will discuss the development of her series of Antarctic photographic projects that critically engage with heroic age histories and narratives of land, place, and environment. Noble will also discuss her recent work that explores the decline of the honeybee, in which she collaborates with scientists to create projects that incorporate the perspectives of both art and science within an aesthetic framework.

Rosalind Solomon, Jenin, 2010. © Rosalind Solomon
Rosalind Solomon: Jumping Off Place: How My Life Animates My Work
Thursday, May 1, 2014 - 5:30pm
Center for Creative Photography Auditoriu
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On Thursday May 1st artist Rosalind Fox Solomon will speak about how her life experience animates her work. Solomon will discuss sources of the internal, visual language that puts her in touch with her subjects.  She will speak of about her personal history and why at age 38, she began her life as an artist and photographer, revealing what led her to examine relationships and ritual; survival and struggle. Throughout her lecture, Solomon will share images, beginning with her earliest pictures in the American South and ending with a preview of her recent photographs from Israel and the West Bank which will be exhibited in Prague in September.  THEM, a book of Solomon’s photographs interspersed with fragmented texts, will be published by MACK in late May. Solomon’s images continue to be widely published and exhibited around the world. 

In 2005, Solomon began to organize her extensive archive which came to the Center for Creative Photography in 2007. The Rosalind Solomon Archive contains a key set of over 1000 fine prints, unique books, and other art works, which together with Solomon’s original negatives, transparencies, personal papers, letters, business files, scrapbooks, video, audio tapes and other documentation chronicle her long and productive career.   Selections from this archive are included in the exhibition Process and The Page: Developing Photographic Books currently on view at the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum (through August 17th, 2014).

Photo: Rosalind Solomon,
Rosalind Solomon, Bride, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 1993. Rosalind Solomon Archive © Rosalind Solomon

May Photo Friday: Rosalind Solomon, Flowers Are Not the Story
May 2, 2014 - 11:30am to 3:30pm
Volkerding Print Viewing Room
Free and open to the public
The focus of the May Photo Friday will be on the work of New York City-based artist Rosalind Solomon. Across diverse societies and circumstances, she examines relationships and ritual; survival and struggle. The selection of photographs references flowers, as in “April showers bring May flowers” which allows for a fine cross-section of her amazing images to be highlighted. The Rosalind Solomon Archive at the Center contains over 1000 fine prints, unique books and other art works which, together with her original negatives, transparencies, personal papers and other documentation, chronicle her long and productive career.  Ms. Solomon’s images continue to be widely published and exhibited around the world.

CCP NEWS

FELLOWSHIPS AWARDED FOR 2014

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

Brendan Fay, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Five Lessons in Photography: Abstraction and Photographic Education in the US, 1940-1960.
The research is for a book-length study of the connections between photographic abstraction and photographic education in the United States during the middle years of the twentieth-century. Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Minor White will be the central figures in examining the evolution of photography as a university subject and of the photographer-teacher as a professional identity. 

Glenn Willumson, Florida Foundation Research Professor of Art History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
“Forging the Canon: Photography 1963-1984.”
The goal of the project is to show that a historical understanding of the emergence of photography during the 1960s and 1970s is critical to an appreciation of the present position of the medium today. Research at the Center for Creative Photography will focus on the institutionalization of photography in museums, universities, and the art market between 1963 and 1984.


Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

Michael Berkowitz, Professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London
The ultimate goal of his research is to write a book that will problematize and perhaps increase appreciation for previously unknown or undervalued relationships between Jews, photography, and modernism.

Thomas Stubblefield, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA
“A study of the life and work of Josef Breitenbach”
His research situates the history of photography within a broad historical frame of visual expression which not only includes fine art and popular imagery, but also the larger social and political context of the work. He will study the life and work of Josef Breitenbach, a photographer whose images bring together the experimentation of Modernism, the psychoanalytic base of Surrealism and the tumultuous political landscape of the early 20th century. 


Milton Rogovin Research Fellowship

Lindsay Harris, Marian and Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Fellow, Modern Italian Studies, American Academy in Rome
She intends to compare Dan Weiner’s photographs of Matera, Italy, with the work of Milton Rogovin. Weiner’s work records his brief encounter with a foreign place while Rogovin’s work is celebrated for his documentation of local communities over generations. The comparison will be used to evaluate the efficacy of different uses of photography in the service of social change. 

Mary N. Woods, Michael A. McCarthy Professor Architectural Theory, Department of Architecture, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
“The Photography of Urban Ruin since the 1960s”
Her book project focuses on the photography of urban ruin in Buffalo, New York, Havana, and Mumbai. Instead of ruins as urban stigmata here their potential to create new urban forms and new communities is explored. Rogovin’s photographs are a pivotal part of a project that weaves his Buffalo into a larger narrative of those living amidst urban ruin in cities shrinking in the global north and exploding in the global south.


Todd Walker Research Fellowship

Monica Steinberg, PhD candidate, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, NY
“Wit, Mutability, and Manipulation in 1960s Los Angeles Artistic Practice”
Utilizing the archives of Todd Walker and Robert Heinecken, Steinberg will conduct research for her dissertation examining the intersection of artistic practice and the mutability of identity within post-war Los Angeles. Often colored by strategies of wit, artists including Walker and Heinecken used photography and book making to examine the nature of myth and reality in a manner that implicated an environment operating in the shadow of Hollywood's character producing machine.


Edward Weston Family Research Fellowship

Ellen Macfarlane Brueckner, PhD candidate, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Seeing Plus: The Photography of Group f.64
The dissertation focuses on the ways in which f.64 endeavored to make “straight” art photography in 1930s America that also possessed political value. Ultimately, Seeing Plus transforms how we might think of political and socially significant American photography during the Depression.

Jennifer Jane Marshall, Associate Professor North American Art, Department of Art History, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
“William Edmondson: Life and Work”
This book project will be the first academic monograph on Edmondson, an African-American self-taught stone carver, active in Nashville during the 1930s and 1940s. His art and legacy depends from the start on his collaboration with photographers, including Edward Weston.  This relationship will be at the heart of her research at CCP.


The Center’s art and archive collections are featured in the following current and upcoming exhibitions:
Vanishing Ice
El Paso Museum of Art, Jun. 1 – Aug. 24, 2014
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Toronto, Canada, Oct. 11, 2014 – Jan. 11, 2015

Curtis Reframed: The Arizona Portfolios 
Arizona State Museum, Tucson, AZ, Nov. 8, 2013 – Jul. 1, 2014

The Photography of Ansel Adams
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ, Dec. 13, 2013 – Apr.14, 2014
http://www.artmuseum.arizona.edu/

Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe in Hawaii  
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Feb. 7 – Sep. 14, 2014

Gary Winogrand 
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Mar. 2, 2014 – Jun. 8, 2014
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Jun. 27, 2014 – Sep. 21, 2014
Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, Oct. 14, 2014 – Feb. 8, 2015

The Visual Blues
Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA, Mar. 8 – Jul. 13, 2014

Robert Heinecken: Object Matter
MoMA, New York, NY, Mar. 15 – Jun. 22, 2014
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Oct. 5, 2014 – Jan. 17, 2015
(Exhibition catalog essay by Jae Gutierrez, Arthur J. Bell Senior Photograph Conservator at the Center for Creative Photography)

PHOENIX ART MUSEUM


Process and the Page: Developing Photographic Books
March 29 through August 17, 2014
In the 20th century, American photographer Ansel Adams adopted the book form as a way to organize, disseminate, and promote his artwork.  Adams took a keen interest in every aspect of the books’ production and design from sequence and typestyle to reproduction quality and pricing.   Process and The Page presents working materials from the Center for Creative Photography’s archives to demonstrate how Ansel Adams, and nine other photographers including Richard Avedon, Paul Strand, W. Eugene Smith, and Rosalind Solomon explored this essential means of preserving and presenting their body of work.
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