Past Lectures
Mark Steinmetz, Barrow County, GA, 1994 (Greater Atlanta series)
Lecture by Mark Steinmetz
Tuesday, April 2, 2013 / 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Highly regarded for his black-and-white portraits, Mark Steinmetz is renowned for producing powerful pictures that capture the strong sense of displacement and isolation felt by many young Americans. His celebrated series of books Greater Atlanta, South East, and South Central – published between 2007 and 2009 – is a lyrical and evocative look at American culture and notions of progress. Steinmetz followed up on this classic trilogy with Summertime in 2011. Later this spring, Nazraeli Press will release Paris in my time, work culled from several extended trips that the artist made to Paris over a twenty-five year period.
Steinmetz’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has taught at universities throughout the United States, include Harvard and Yale. Steinmetz currently resides in Athens, Georgia./
Mark Steinmetz: http://www.marksteinmetz.net
Tod Papageorge, Passing through Eden, 1966-1992. © Tod Papageorge
Lecture by Tod Papageorge
Thursday, March 7, 2013 / 7PM
Phyllis Wattis Theater, SFMOMA
151 3rd Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Free and open to the public
In 1962, Tod Papageorge began to photograph while studying at the University of New Hampshire. After living in Boston, San Francisco, and Europe, he moved to New York in 1965 and was quickly accepted into a small circle of photographers engaged in transforming the documentary "style" of the medium into a poetic form driven by subjective perception over journalistic literalism.
During the 1970s, Papageorge received two Guggenheim Fellowships in photography and a pair of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants. Following one-year appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Harvard University, he was named the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale University School of Art in 1979; he also served as the Director of Graduate Study in Photography until 2011.
Papageorge is the author of Public Relations: The Photographs of Garry Winogrand and Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, produced in conjunction with exhibitions he guest-curated for the Museum of Modern Art in 1977 and the Yale University Art Gallery in 1981. In 2011, Aperture published Core Curriculum, a collection of his writings on photography.
Papageorge's photographic work has been widely exhibited internationally and is included in more than thirty major public collections. He has published three monographs: Passing through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (Steidl, 2007), American Sports, 1970, or How We Spent the War in Vietnam (Aperture, 2008), and Opera Citta (punctum, 2010).
In 2008, he was invited to the American Academy in Rome as a resident in the visual arts and, in 2010, was awarded the Rome Commission in Photography. He was the recipient of the Lucie Award for documentary photography in December 2012.
Martin Parr, GB. England. New Brighton. From The Last Resort, 1983-85. © Magnum Photos and Martin Parr
Lecture by Martin Parr
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 / 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco CA, 94107
Free and open to the public
British photographer Martin Parr is a true master of social commentary, capturing humanity in all of its follies. He frames the revealing moments – often highlighting cultural peculiarities – with quirky precision and presents them in ultra-vivid color. Growing up in the English suburbs of the early 1960s, Parr’s passion for collecting and his grandfather’s enthusiasm for photography laid the groundwork for his career as a documentary photographer; he went on to study photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970 to 1973. In recent years, he has developed an interest in filmmaking and has started to use his photography in different contexts such as fashion and advertising.
In 1994, he became a member of Magnum Photos after much debate over his provocative photographic style. The Barbican Art Gallery and National Media Museum initiated a large retrospective of Parr's work in 2002; the exhibition toured Europe for the next five years.
Parr has published a multitude of artist’s books including Life’s a Beach (2012), Mexico (2006), Common Sense (2002), Small World (1995), The Cost of Living (1989) and Last Resort (1986). Additionally, he is an expert in the subject of photo books, collaborating on a series of volumes tracing the major trends and movements since the genre’s birth.
In 2004, Parr was appointed a professor of photography at the University of Wales Newport campus. He served as a guest artistic director for Rencontres D'Arles in 2008 and curated the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010.