November at the Center for Creative Photography

1030 North Olive Road, Tucson, Arizona, 85721 (520) 621-7968
www.creativephotography.org

All events at CCP are free and open to the public.

Current exhibition

John Gutmann: The Photographer at Work
Through January 10, 2010

John Gutmann (1905–1998) captured images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however imperfect. German born and trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 for San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-reporter. His outsider status—a Jew in Germany, an immigrant in the United States—informed his focus on multiculturalism. This exhibition draws on the Center for Creative Photography’s archive of Gutmann’s photographs and papers to present both unfamiliar works and little-known contexts for his imagery, linking his photography to his passion for painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts, and his devotion to teaching. 

 

Reception and lecture
John Gutmann’s Image of Freedom
Friday, October 30; Reception at 5 p.m., lecture at 6 p.m.

Guest curator Sally Stein takes as a starting point the 1941 juried photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Images of Freedom, and considers in particular how the strange yet successful submission by Gutmann exemplified his own defiance of convention and his love of the anti-traditional in his adopted homeland. Stein is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of California and continues as an independent scholar to study American photography and culture.  Her most recent publication is John Gutmann: The Photographer at Work, the exhibition catalogue.

Artist’s talk
Zoe Strauss
Tuesday, November 17, 5:30 p.m.

Contemporary artist Zoe Strauss is a native of South Philadelphia. She creates unflinchingly tough head-on color photographs that draw you up close to the urban American we are most comfortable viewing from a safe distance. Her work addresses themes such as gender and identity; addiction and desire; what it means to be American; and hope, pride, and joy. Strauss received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2005 and exhibited in the 2007 Whitney Biennial.

Save the date

Film screening and discussion
Tuesday, January 26, 5:30 p.m.

My Eyes Were Fresh: The Life and Photographs of  John Gutmann (2006, 30 minutes), a film by Jane Levy Reed, is an intimate portrait of the artist narrated by Gutmann in a series of filmed interviews and commentaries recorded in the years just before his death in 1998. It profiles his art and life, both of which helped forge a link between the European modernism of the early 20th century and the burgeoning artistic culture of the San Francisco Bay Area in the second half of the century. Jennifer Jenkins, Associate Professor of Media Arts, who teaches film history at the University of Arizona, will introduce the film.

Center News

New Acquisitions
Harold Jones Archive

The Center is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the Harold Jones Archive. Photographer, curator, and photo educator Harold Jones was a founder of LIGHT Gallery, New York (1973 – 1975), the founding Director of the Center for Creative Photography (1975 – 1977), and a professor in the University of Arizona, School of Art Photography Program since its inception. He remains active in the Center’s Voices of Photography oral history project and has established a Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series, now in its third year. 

The Harold Jones Archive consists of a selective master set of prints, correspondence, teaching and exhibition files, biographical materials, publications and clippings, records of the Society for Photographic Education, and ephemera covering his career from the time he was a student at the University of New Mexico to the present.

 

November at the Doris and John Norton Gallery, Phoenix Art Museum

www.PhxArt.org

 

Current exhibition

Face to Face: 150 Years of Portraiture
Through January 10, 2010

Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture explores the photographic portrait—the stories portraits can tell, the ways photographers convey the essence of their subjects, and the impact of the relationship between photographer and subject. Including nearly 60 portraits from the Center for Creative Photography, as well as key loans from a few local collections, the exhibition raises engaging questions: How does a portrait become iconic? What is unique about a photographic self-portrait? What are the advantages of working in the studio, or in the field?  How do photographers use setting, pose, camera angle, or scale to add meaning to a picture?  Prints by some of the greatest portraitists and photographic image-makers of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century are included: Southworth and Hawes, Gertrude Kasebier, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon.

Photo News

Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies
Sam Lee Gallery (Chinatown), Los Angeles
October 30 to December 5, 2009
Opening reception Friday, October 30, 2009, 6 to 9 p.m.

Sam Lee Gallery presents Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies, an exhibition guest-curated by photography historian and University of Arizona faculty member Kate Palmer Albers. The show features artists working at the edges of photography, landscape, technology, and geo-location, and includes work by Lewis Baltz, Christiana Caro, Andrew Freeman, Frank Gohlke (also a UA faculty member), Margot Anne Kelley, Mark Klett, Paho Mann, Adam Thorman, and Byron Wolfe.

Inspired by the current revival of the influential and critically acclaimed New Topographics exhibition from 1975, which will be concurrently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art followed by an exhibition at CCP, Locating Landscape highlights some of the most interesting young artists working in Los Angeles and the Southwest today, linking their work with the New Topographics generation.

“New Topographics was a watershed moment in the history of landscape photography,” says Albers, “It’s been a major undercurrent in photographic practice for more than forty years, and now—especially with the rapid growth and ready availability of networked mapping and locational technologies—we’re seeing an explosion of new work that’s taking landscape in a new direction.”