This month I want to celebrate the extraordinary student employees who work in the Center for Creative Photography's Volkerding Study Center. All assignments are designed to create a learning experience for each individual student while improving access to information about our archive collections. The students are all trained in art and archive handling by Jae Gutierrez, the Arthur J. Bell Senior Photograph Conservator, and the staff in Registration. In addition to processing archives many of them participate in monitoring the Volkerding reading room when researchers are present.

Krista Niles is a graduate student in the MA Art History program and the Center’s Ansel Adams Intern for 2013/2014. She has extensive experience in working as a newspaper reporter and teaching photography.  She is curating the CCP’s upcoming Photo Friday, helps the Archivist prepare for class print viewings by compiling lists of photographs and researching the photographs to be shown, and creating presentations for class viewings. She is also doing research to match Edward Weston Daybook entries with Edward Weston photographs, and compiled the photographs by Charles Harbutt for the video currently showing in the exhibition.
 
Sarah Helbling is an undergraduate studying photography. We don’t usually hire undergraduates but Sarah’s intelligence and enthusiasm for any project continues to impress us. Sarah verified the inventory of Edward Weston’s small portrait negatives in preparation for scanning, re-sleeved and made an inventory of Barbara Crane negatives, and has begun working on a project in the Hans Namuth Archive.
 
Kayleigh Hoffsmith recently graduated from the University’s Graduate School in Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS). She is arranging and describing the Barbara Crane Archive and the Robert Sobieszek Archive, has researched acquisition dates for all archival collections, creates MARC records for the library catalog, reviews other students’ cataloging and uploads their MARC records to OCLC.
 
Madison Reynolds is currently enrolled as a SIRLS graduate student and came to work at the Center because she is interested in learning archive processing. She has arranged and described the John Schaefer Collection and the Francis Bruguière negatives.
 
Ann Richwine is a SIRLS graduate student with a background in the history of photography who is interested in learning archive processing. She has worked extensively on Thomas Barrow Archive,  including adding new acquisitions as we acquire them, and is involved in processing the archives of Lynn Stern, Oliver Gagliani, Harold Jones, and Charles Harbutt. She assists the Archivists with research to answer reference inquiries, creates inventories of new acquisitions so the Archivists can create incoming paperwork and catalog records, creates MARC records for the library catalog, reviews other students’ cataloging and uploads their MARC records to OCLC.  
 
Leah Rios is a Knowledge River graduate student in SIRLS. She assists the Archivists in answering reference inquiries, has arranged and described the Todd Webb Archive, and is now adding new material to the Charis Wilson Archive.
 
The work our student employees accomplish is enormously valuable, and we know that their experience working at the Center is an advantage when they graduate and seek full-time employment. One of my goals is to increase the number of internships the Center for Creative Photography can offer to incoming graduate students, which will make the U of A more competitive with other graduate programs. If you are interested in supporting an internship please contact me or the Center’s Director of Development, Ruth McCutcheon: mccutcheonr@ccp.arizona.edu.

martinezk@ccp.arizona.edu

On Thursday, March 27th, Penelope Umbrico and UA art history professor Kate Palmer Albers will discuss the artist’s photo-based installations, video, and digital media works that explore the ever-changing technologies of image making, and the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. Utilizing photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive, Umbrico navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective. Her works question the idea of the “democratization” of photography and media, where pre-scripted images, made with tools programmed to function in predetermined ways, undermine a claim to authorship, subjectivity and individuality. For Umbrico, all images within this emergent environment are evidence of something other than what they depict.