ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS

LECTURE
An Overview of Photographic Criticism
Vince Leo

Beginning with the 19th century and continuing to the present, this talk will examine the way photography has been shaped by theoretical discussions generated within and outside of the photographic establishment. Among other topics, it will deal with pictorialism, documentary, feminism, photographic postmodernism, and the politics of marginalization.

LECTURE
The Daguerreotype in American Cultural History
Alan Trachtenberg

The lecture will be a discussion on the daguerreotype portrait as a cultural artifact.

LECTURE
The Act of Witness in the Age of Electronic Imagery
Max Kozloff

An examination of the technological changes in recent image production, analyzing the moral, political, and philosophical implications of a transformation that discounts the act of witness in photography.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Sophie Rivera

As an artist, Latina, and feminist, Sophie Rivera will present a slide show that traces her photographic development from its early origins through various transformations to its culmination in a complex amalgam of vision. Aspects of photojournalism, portraiture, caricature, street photography, the nude, still life, abstract, urban studies, and self portraiture are central to her development as an artist. Individually or in various complex combinations, these modalities have been suffused with all her creative energies and attempts to integrate her cultural heritage into an artistic endeavor.

LECTURE
Twenty Six Gas Stations: The Problem with Canons
Michael Darling

An analysis of Ed Ruscha's Twenty Six Gasoline Stations as an artwork that does not conform to modernist canons for photography, or modernism in general opens a discussion on the shortcomings and limits of artistic canons. Issues which may be pertinent to the discussion include the emergence and definition of postmodernism; defining criteria for photography; and roles played by artists, historians, critics and curators.

LECTURE
To Survey or Not to Survey? Issues in the Writing of Women's History
Whitney Chadwick

This presentation discusses whether or not women can be adequately represented within the format of the art historical survey. What other models need to be explored? How is the representation of women mediated by issues of class and ethnicity? Is it possible to reformulate the canon? To redefine the relationship between the center and the margins?

DISCUSSION
Historian/Critic?
Shelley Rice
Whitney Chadwick

Do critic/historians wear two distinct hats or one large one? A discussion of the continuities, dissimilarities, benefits, and pitfalls of working as both historian and critic.

LECTURE
Cramping "Photography's Discursive Spaces"
Mark William Woods

In an effort to politicize the history of photography, Rosalind Krauss encourages writers to employ the critical strategies of Michel Foucault with her essay "Photography's Discursive Spaces." In doing so, however, she champions a strategy (called "archaeology" by Foucault) that commits its practitioners to political neutrality, and chooses a task ("Maintaining Early Photography as an Archive") that is incompatible with that Foucaultian strategy. A critique of her essay elaborates the dangers of inadvertently sanctioning political neutrality as a stance for photography's critical historians.

PANEL
Post Mortem on Post Modernism
Moderator: Shelley Rice
Panelists: Marvin Heiferman, Judith Wilson

A discussion of the strong and weak points of the postmodern movement and its legacy for the 1990's.

LECTURE
Reframing the Woman Photographer: Historical Perspectives/New Paradigms
Whitney Chadwick

In this lecture, the historical conditions under which women have worked as photographers is examined in relation to those of other women in the visual arts. Emphasis on the specifics of historical context and on issues of production in relation to those of representation.

LECTURE
A Shot at the Canonical Texts
Mary Anne Staniszewski

Mary Anne will take a shot at the canonical texts, Janson, Gardner, and Griselda Pollack as well as offer a look at contemporary feminist practice.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Chronology, Connections, Conceptions, Collaborations 1975-1991
Patrick Nagatani

In this presentation, nine bodies of Nagatani's work are presented, connected, and somewhat explained. Influence, change, and process are some of the issues covered in Nagatani's discussion.

LECTURE
Nuclear Enchantment: The Politics That Form the Images
Patrick Nagatani

An in-depth presentation on the various specific issues and information that layer each image in this series. The talk specifically refers to New Mexico's nuclear involvement historically and in contemporary times.

TOUR
Jayne H. Baum Gallery

This tour will be led by Patrick Nagatani. Jayne will discuss the relationship between artist and gallery.

LECTURE
Photographic Identity and Consumer Desire, 1840s and 1980s
Julia Ballerini

This presentation examines the use of statuettes in 1840s photographs by Daguerre, Bayard, and Talbot as well as some uses of surrogate figures in contemporary photography. Stuart Culver's essay "What Manikins Want" and Ballerini's essay "The Surrogate Figure" are discussed in terms of the methodological as well as conceptual models they propose.

LECTURE
Paris in the 19th Century: Photography and the City
Shelley Rice

Exploring the relationship between the early years of French photography and the rebuilding of Paris by Napoleon the Third, this lecture examines the creation of modern urban space in two and three dimensions.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Frank Gohlke

Through a discussion of three bodies of work--Grain Elevators, Mt. Saint Helens, and the Sudbury River in Massachusetts--Gohlke explores the process, problems, and benefits of working on projects.

LECTURE
Nuclear Enchantment
Patrick Nagatani

This presentation is about the collaboration between Eugenia Parry Janis and Nagatani (the historian and the artist) in the evolution of the book Nuclear Enchantment. It's also a discussion of the time and trouble it takes to produce a quality book.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Nancy Burson

Burson shows and discuss her composite works and the "real photographs."

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Lisa Lewenz

Lewenz's work, which she describes as "performance documents," addresses environmental, political, and social issues. Through her work, she juxtaposes and explores the overlap of public and private histories, focusing attention on memory and invisible or forgotten events. Her work is collaborative, and involves community participation and interaction.

LECTURE
The Magnetic Mirror, the Dream of Self-Knowledge
Ken Feingold

Human beings have a long history of representing our experience of the world and of our own interiority. Drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, film, video, and computers are all parts of this search for a technology with which we can reproduce ourselves, or mimic our senses--in this case, with a particular emphasis on vision. This presentation will discuss the questions around the possible pasts and futures of these visual media in the larger context of this drive to formulate mimetic technologies.

LECTURE
Media Literacy
Fred Ritchin

This lecture is a look at the editorial distortion of information, and in particular at the practice of limiting the potential variety of images. This will be followed by a discussion of how these practices affect the public's ability to comprehend and react to an event or situation.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
The Diary, The System and The Street: What I Think I Am Up To
Barbara Jo Revelle

Barbara Jo will discuss how she moved from intensely private, autobiographical work into a realm of making public art and the the issues involved in that transition. She will discuss her influences in literate and Structuralist Films.

LECTURE
Shadows of a Decade: Sandinista Photographic Pictograms in Revolutionary Nicaragua
Elizabeth Chilsen

During the 1980's a unique variety of graffiti appeared in Nicaragua. The graffiti consisted of stenciled images that used popular and well known photographs as their source. Photographs were chosen because they seem inherently truthful and because their meaning is malleable. The Nicaraguan graffiti utilized historical photographs as well as the modern ones. Based on writings by William Ivrins, Estelle Jussim, Vincent Leo, and others, this presentation will discuss the process of transformation from photograph to graffiti; an example of a use for photographs which both relies on an challenges the notion of photographic truth. I will also discuss the cultrual context of the Nicaraguan Revolution in which the images were created.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Ellen Brooks

Ellen Brooks will show work completed over the past fifteen years and discuss how she combines her social, cultural and political concerns with her personal concerns.

DEMONSTRATION
Computer Possibilities - AGFA Demonstration Center in Manhattan

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Digital Revisions
Esther Parada

Three of her projects during 1991-92 took a critical look at traditional historical representations. (Central America and the Caribbean as seen in the Keystone - Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography; the neo-classical and Nazi iconography of Konigsplatz in Munich Germany; and the presence of Blacks during the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago). She will compare the strategies and issues involved in each project and consider their continuity/discontinuity with earlier, predigital work.

ARTIST PRESENTATION
MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill)

This presentation is a synoptic history of MANUAL in the context of developing electronic media, 1974-1992.

PANEL
Issues for Artists: Displacement; The Artists as Homesteaders, the Artists as Polemicists

Moderator: Barbara Jo Revelle
Panelists: Ed Hill, Suzanne Bloom, Esther Parada

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill): In reaction to an installation, one critic asks: "Of course, the question that hounds this sort of environmental awareness is, if the artists are so concerned, why don't they invest all this time and energy and raw materials and hazardous photographic chemistry into a wider venue than an art gallery?"

Parada: Fred Ritchin, Martha Rosler, and others have signaled the challenge to authenticity or truth value of the photographic image which is raised by digital manipulation. She will show the work of two artists, based in Chicago, who creatively exploit this tension.

Revelle: I am interested in how technology- based media figures into what Encenberger has called the "mind industry" and how artists can use computers as activist tools. I will show the work of Michael Nash, Lisa Link, Craig Freeman and the late Jim Pomeroy and make observations about the subversive potential of digital imagery.

LECTURE
Written on the Wind: Rethinking the Photographic Network
Vince Leo

This talk begins with the premise that photographers depend to a large extent on external circumstances to complete their work. It argues that every photograph is to some greater or lesser degree a collaboration--with history, with other human beings, with natural conditions--and that this relationship, this politics, is the basis for a new practice and aesthetics of photography.

CONFERENCE
Framing the News: New Guideline for Photographic Reproduction in the Computer Age

This Conference is co-sponsored with the Division of Copywright and the New Technologies, Interactive Telecommunications Program, and NYU.

A century and a half after photography's debut there is a revolution in imagemaking that makes photographic images more malleable and requires greater vigilance by photographers, editors and readers - computer imaging. A committee of representatives from news and photographers organizations have drawn up a set of guidelines aimed toward building a consensus among photographers, editors, and the publishing industry.

These guidelines will be presented and discussed at this conference.

DISCUSSION
Carole Vance

Carole Vance will talk about the symbolic and cultural politics underlying recent controversies about images and the NEA. She will place art controversies within the larger political struggle to shape culture.

LECTURE
Things That Happen in Museums
Carol Duncan

Following from the premise that "a museum is not the neutral and transparent sheltering space that it is often claimed to be," this lecture will examine the museum as a programmed experience.

TOUR
Museum of Modern Art Print Room
Carol Kismaric

ARTIST PRESENTATION
Coreen Simpson

Using her own work as a starting point, Simpson examines issues of marketability and survival as they relate to artists.

LECTURE
Notes on Organizing "The Mediated Image: American Photography since 1960"
Therese Mulligan

Therese Mulligan will speak on her participation in organizing The Mediated Image: American Photography since 1960 exhibition at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. This exhibition examines the resurgence of montage in American photography over the last three decades.

LECTURE
The Organization and Changing Missions of Art Museums in the USA
Paul DiMaggio

Paul DiMaggio will speak about the organization of U.S. art museums in historical perspective, focusing on changes in the purposes and publics that they have served.

LECTURE
Funding Artists' Work
Roger Bruce

By outlining the grantmaking strategies generally recognized by foundations and other organizations, this talk will examine project sponsorship, fellowships, cash awards, artist colonies, and residencies as a way for photographers to subsidize their aesthetic research and development.

LECTURE
Alternative Venues
Vince Leo

The more rarified the art world becomes the less chance there is for artists and photographers to create work at a grassroots cultural level. This talk will examine various alternative venues--zines, cable access, self-publishing, and telecommunications--as ways for artists to establish and contact their own communities while using different, pre-existing networks.

LECTURE
Beyond Mapplethorpe: Body Politics and Culture War
David Mendoza

A presentation detailing the history of pornography and its evolution and significance in the culture wars. The ground covered includes the 1986 Meese Commission Report, the orchestrated efforts of the religious far right, and the attacks on libraries, the arts, videos stores, etc.

LECTURE
Me and the NEA Four
Holly Hughes