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JANUARY 2014
Center for Creative Photography | FOCAL POINT
1030 North Olive Road, Tucson, Arizona, 85721 • (520) 621-7968 • www.creativephotography.org
Margrethe Mather, Evening Gloves 1931
Letter from the Director
January 2014
Over the holidays I enjoyed the luxury of spending time with books about photography and museums in a comfortable chair. Here’s what I can recommend. I am in awe of Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Her writing sweeps you along in an amazing way. Another page-turner for me was Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers. In a different mode I thoroughly enjoyed Neil Harris’s juicy book Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience that took me back to my early years in Washington, D.C. working at the Smithsonian. I am also dutifully reading more serious titles about museum administration, including A Handbook for Academic Museums: Beyond Exhibitions and Education that are proving to be very helpful. As for photography books, while I was on vacation I read the most recent issue of The Photobook Review edited by the fabulous Darius Himes, and came away even more determined that the Center needs a bibliographer with an acquisitions budget to keep us current in this energized arena of photographic presentation. People who come to my office know that I have some favorites, including Wilmot by Susan Paulsen and Bird Watching by Paula McCartney. I’m sure I have forgotten other photography book favorites, because as many of you know, I love books. Just before the holidays I saw two wonderful exhibitions, both in California—so you folks on the right coast need to come West more often. I loved Susan Ehrens’ and Julian Cox’s exhibition The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel. Her work is exquisite. And my socks were totally knocked off by See the Light: Photography, Perception, Cognition at LACMA, curated by Britt Salvesen.  The exhibition can be seen through March 23 and is truly eye-opening. Now that I am listing recent favorites I suppose I should end with the usual question I am constantly asked: Do you have a favorite photograph or a favorite photographer?  As if it is even possible to pick just one from amidst the 90,000+ in the collection. That said, I have to admit that portraits of hands have a special appeal for me. Two favorites are by Margrethe Mather, both taken in 1931: Hands (78.150.7) and Evening Gloves (79.13.5).  And I have been known to sigh over Barbara Bosworth’s Christmas Solar Eclipse in my Father's Hands, Sanibel (2008.65.7).  Happy New Year everyone! 
Katharine Martinez, Ph. D., Director
martinezk@ccp.arizona.edu

CCP EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

Charles Harbutt, Aboard Le Mistral, Arles/Paris, France 1975 Gift of the artist. ©Charles Harbutt 2013.9.32.
Charles Harbutt, Aboard Le Mistral, Arles/Paris, France 1975 Gift of the artist. ©Charles Harbutt

Charles Harbutt, Departures and Arrivals: 
The Conversation

January 16, 2014 - 5:30pm

Center for Creative Photography Archive photographer Charles Harbutt, subject of the current exhibition, will speak about his work and life in photography with independent curator Trudy Wilner Stack and photographer, editor, and educator, Joan Liftin. The three, colleagues for over thirty years, recently worked together on Harbutt’s retrospective book, Departures and Arrivals, the occasion for and centerpiece of the exhibition on view at CCP. They will discuss their thoughts on photography in the context of Harbutt’s long career as photojournalist, personal documentarian, and teacher. The evening will include a presentation by Harbutt of his most recent project, made in 2013. The Conversation will also consider the nature of photography itself, its practice and its presentation in exhibitions and publications, and the CCP Charles Harbutt Archive, established in 1997 when Wilner Stack was CCP Curator. This talk is free and open to the public.

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, Yosemite Valley, Rain and Mist, Yosemite National Park, California, ca. 1940
Ansel Adams, Yosemite Valley, Rain and Mist, Yosemite National Park, California, ca. 1940
Collection Center for Creative Photography
©The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

February Photo Friday: Ansel Adams: Themes and Variations
February 7, 2014 - 11:30am to 3:30pm
Volkerding Print Viewing Room
Free and open to the public

Music played an important role throughout Ansel Adams’ life.  At the age of twelve, Adams taught himself to play the piano and to read music.  For the next ten years or so he studied piano, intending to pursue a career as a concert pianist.  Although he eventually gave up the piano for photography, music influenced his work as a photographer throughout his career.  Adams said, “...the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when ‘performed’ as a print." The February 7th Photo Friday at the Center for Creative Photography will feature pairs and small groups of Adams photographs exploring an idea taken from music – themes and variations. 

CCP NEWS

Fellowships
Application deadline is January 15, 2014.

The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, invites applications for fellowships in support of research using the Center's archive, fine print, and rare book collections. Our goal is to promote new knowledge about photography, photographic history, and photographic theory. Fellowship applications are evaluated within this context.

QUALIFICATIONS - Scholars from any discipline are encouraged to apply. Pre-doctoral applicants must have completed coursework and preliminary examinations for the doctoral degree, and must be engaged in dissertation research.

APPLICATION PROCESS - Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae of no more than four pages, and a brief statement detailing your research interests and how they will be advanced by study of the Center's archives and print collection. Attention will be given to the candidate's statement concerning the value of the Center's holdings in investigating those interests. Please visit the Center's website for more information about collections.

SELECTION PROCESS - Selection is based on the quality of the proposed research and its relationship to the Center's collections. Residencies must be scheduled with the Volkerding Study Center staff. Fellowship recipients and their research projects will be announced in the Center's publicity.

Please visit our website for details on specific fellowships.

PHOENIX ART MUSEUM


See, Hear, Feel: The Photographs of Debra Bloomfield and Christopher Churchill
December 7, 2013 to March 23, 2014

What would change if you could hear the subject of a photograph speak to you? If you could hear the wind moving through the trees in a landscape photograph? How would the world you see shift as it became a world you could hear?

See, Hear, Feel explores that idea through the work of two contemporary photographers, Debra Bloomfield and Christopher Churchill, who push the limits of their artistic practice and explore the dimension of sound. Bloomfield traverses existing wilderness spaces, her abstract images of the untamed intensified through the call of ravens or the crunch of boots in settled snow. Christopher Churchill explores a wilderness of a different kind, as he takes the viewer along a journey across the post 9/11 nation to discuss our changing ideas of faith. As we view compelling portraits, we listen to their subjects reveal to us what they believe. Featuring nearly 40 photographs with accompanying sound, these two seemingly divergent bodies of work will converge to create a sense of wonder about our world and ourselves: what we see, what we hear, and what we feel, in the public, wild places of landscape, and in the private, wild places of faith. 
Debra Bloomfield, Wilderness #02076-8-07, 2007 / 2013. Archival Pigment Print. © Debra Bloomfield
Debra Bloomfield, Wilderness #02076-8-07, 2007 / 2013. Archival Pigment Print. ©Debra Bloomfield

Artist Talk: Wilderness: A Journey with
Debra Bloomfield
January 15, 2014 - 7:00pm

Phoenix Art Museum, Singer Hall

Join INFOCUS and Debra Bloomfield for our first Artist Talk of 2014, in conjunction with the exhibition See, Hear, Feel in the Norton Gallery. After Bloomfield’s presentation, she will be joined by Norton Family Curator of Photography, Rebecca A. Senf, for a conversation about her work.

Debra Bloomfield will present her newest monograph, Wilderness, photographed over the past five years. The artist will discuss the process of developing this body of work, in which she found inspiration in the life work of conservation movement leaders, notably Margaret Murie. Bloomfield has worked in the landscape for 35 years, and her poetic large-scale color photographs focus on the relationship between interiority and the external world, questioning how we use and misuse our land.
William M. Hunt, photo by Ethan Hill
W.M. Hunt, photo ©Ethan Hill

Lecture: Bill Hunt: The Ten Most Exciting Photographers
I Learned About This Year
February 5, 2014 - 7:00pm

Phoenix Art Museum, Whiteman Hall

A self-described champion of photography, W.M. “Bill” Hunt will engage the INFOCUS audience with his list of the 10 most exciting photographers he learned about this year. Hunt is passionate and unpredictable. He likes to emphasize the "de-light" in photography. For 40 years, Hunt has been a collector, dealer (Hasted Hunt, Ricco/Maresca), curator, writer, teacher (SVA, Aperture and ICP), and story-teller. His book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious was published in 2011 by Aperture in the US, Thames & Hudson in the UK, and as L'Oeil Invisible by Actes Sud in France and selected by most of the Top Ten lists. He is working on a number of new projects while he continues to write and lecture, review portfolios, judge competitions, and serve on the boards of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. And, he is a pretty funny guy (self-described).
BE SURE TO VISIT THE CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY AT WWW.CREATIVEPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG
Center for Creative Photography



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