Elliott Erwitt
   Lecture: Friday, September 29, 2006, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                 [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: September 22 to November 12, 2006
                     UK Art Museum

Wendy Ewald
   Lecture: Friday, December 1, 2006, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                  [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: November 17, 2006 to January 17, 2007 
                     UK Art Museum

Larry Towell
   Lecture: Friday, Friday, January 19, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center  
                 [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: January 17 to March 11, 2007
                     UK Art Museum

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison
    Lecture: Friday, March 23, 2007, 4:00 pm
                  Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                  [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
    Exhibition: March 20 to May 13, 2007
                      UK Art Museum


Links to:
2003 - 2004 May Lecture Series
2004 - 2005 May Lecture Series
2005 - 2006 May Lecture Series

ELLIOTT ERWITT

   Lecture: Friday, September 29, 2006, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
   Exhibition: September 22 to November 12, 2006
                     UK Art Museum



As a photojournalist working with the agency Magnum, Erwitt has photographed news events around the world and made his mark with a series of iconic images that live in our memories. He captured the grief of a nation in the face of Jacqueline Kennedy; he caught the essence of the Cold War when Richard Nixon jabbed Nikita Khrushchev in the chest during the famed kitchen debates in Moscow. Seeing a man in segregated North Carolina drinking from a fountain labeled “colored,” he used his camera to raise the issue of basic human dignity.

But what Erwitt is best known for is his ability to seek out and seize those moments of visual irony that speak to us succinctly and wryly of foibles human, canine, and otherwise. Early in his career, he developed the habit of carrying a second camera on assignment to take his own photographs. Dogs—with their all-too-human expressions—have been a favorite subject. A terrier seems to levitate beside its flat-footed master; a small Chihuahua is dwarfed by a pair of sandal-clad feet. Erwitt often drops to the dog’s eye level to give a sense of the world through canine eyes, making us aware of our own absurdities.

Museums have long been a favorite haunt of the photographer, who has made a fine art of people watching. A nude, neoclassical sculpture raises bow and arrow in apparent pursuit of the vanishing back of a museum guard. In Madrid’s Prado Museum, a group of art-hungry men congregate before Goya’s naked Maja; off to the side, a lone woman contemplates the clothed version. At Versailles, tourists congregate before an empty frame, while a bewigged gentleman in the painting next to them appears gently amused at such silliness. As Vicki Goldberg has observed, “Mr. Erwitt has repeatedly put the 35-millimeter camera to one of its more refined uses: to snatch from the flux of common disorder the perfectly ordered absurdities, incongruities, and coincidences that chance randomly doles out.”

Erwitt, who was born in Paris to Russian parents, spent his early years in Italy. He was eleven when he and his parents found passage on one of the last ships out of France days before the outbreak of the Second World War. He lived in New York and then California as a youngster, picking up a camera in his years at Hollywood High. A peripatetic family life left him on his own at sixteen, and he determined to be a photographer. In 1949, at twenty-one, he returned to New York. There, he met a triumvirate of giants in the photography world: Roy Stryker, former director of the Farm Security Administration; Robert Capa, a founder of Magnum; and photography pioneer Edward Steichen, then photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Stryker hired him to work on the groundbreaking Standard Oil documentary project. Steichen used three of his photographs in the legendary Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955. Robert Capa gave him a job at Magnum in 1953.

In a career spanning more than fifty years, Elliott Erwitt has shown his photographs in museums and galleries around the world. His work is part of many permanent collections—among them the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Kunsthaus, in Zurich. Erwitt has also worked in film, producing the documentaries Beauty Knows No Pain (1971), Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan (1977), and Red, White and Bluegrass (1973), which focuses on traditional Appalachian music. His work is featured in numerous monographs: Photographs and Anti-Photographs (1972), Personal Exposures (1988), To the Dogs (1992), Between the Sexes (1994), Museum Watching (1999), Snaps (2001), and Elliott Erwitt’s Handbook (2002).

Above Image:
ELLIOTT ERWITT
Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's Funeral, Arlington, Virginia, November 25, 1963,
gelatin silver print, © Elliott Erwittl/Magnum Photos

WENDY EWALD

   Lecture: Friday, December 1, 2006, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
   Exhibition: November 17, 2006 to January 7, 2007
                     UK Art Museum



In 1975, fresh out of college, Wendy Ewald arrived in Letcher County, Kentucky, with the idea of documenting the Appalachian community in a way that caught the “soul and rhythm of the place.” The problem Ewald found as an outsider was that her camera got in the way of developing trusting relationships.

Having worked summers on a Native American reservation in Canada, Ewald discovered that teaching photography to her young charges gave them a liberating tool for examining their lives and communicating difficult experiences. She went to the Cowan Elementary School with a grant from the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film and an offer to set up a similar program there. It was a way of providing a service to the community and a means of coming to know it.

The program was quickly expanded to two other schools, with help from the Kentucky Arts Commission, and, over a four-year period, Ewald worked with one hundred and fifty children between the ages of six and fourteen. In the end, it was her collaboration with these students that created the intimate portrait she sought of the community.

She encouraged them to photograph their homes, their families, their friends. She spoke to them about their fears and dreams and led them to capture these in black-and-white as well; she then used the images as a catalyst for the students to talk and write about their lives. A group of their photographs and writings, along with Ewald’s, came together in the 1985 book Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians.

In the three decades that have passed since Ewald first ventured into Letcher County, she has built upon her experience in Kentucky to collaborate with children and adults around the world through photography and literacy programs, in communities in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Working with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Ewald created the Literacy Through Photography Program to bring her methods to public schools.

Ewald studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Photography with Minor White. She has received many honors for her innovative creative practice, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Visual Arts Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Fulbright Commission.

She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center for Photography, in New York; the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson; the George Eastman House, in Rochester; the Ackland Art Museum, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Ansel Adams Center, in San Francisco, and many others. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Library of Congress are among the institutions that collect her work.

A number of Ewald’s books focus on her collaborations with children: In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits (2006), American Alphabets (2005), Wendy Ewald: Secret Games, Collaborative Works with Children 1969–1999 (2000); I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket: The Story of an Indian Village (1996), and Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood (1992). Ewald’s aforementioned Portraits and Dreams is scheduled to be reprinted next year by Steidl.

Above Image:
WENDY EWALD
An African American Alphabet, made in collaboration with middle school students in Cleveland, Ohio
from American Alphabets series, 1999, gelatin silver print, courtesy of the artist.

 

LARRY TOWELL
   Lecture: Friday, January 19, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
   Exhibition: January 17 to March 11, 2007
                     UK Art Museum



Larry Towell has been a journalist, poet, folk musician, farmer, and photographer. Bearing a business card that simply identifies him as “human being,” he continues the practice of all these disciplines as an individual who feels the need to both witness and inquire into the lives of the exiled, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised.

His investigations have led him as far afield as Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the disputed region of Palestine, and as close to home as rural Ontario, Canada, where he became acquainted with a group of Mennonite migrant workers who had traveled there from Mexico and were eking out a meager existence. Always attracted to society’s nonconformists, Towell came to know and photograph members of the religious group—who eschew modern ways of life—in both Canada and in isolated desert colonies in Mexico over a decade’s time. A loving but unflinching portrait of their lives and values emerges in his book The Mennonites (2000). Typical of Towell’s immersion in the project, he also began studying and recording the sixteenth-century hymns of the Mennonites (available on CD).

At the other end of the spectrum, Towell made repeated trips to war-torn El Salvador between 1985 and 1996; there, he photographed the victims of death squads, a mother’s grief, the maimed survivors, the tortured, and the mutilated. But he also found beauty in a woman cradling a child, the poignancy in masked youngsters celebrating the Day of the Dead, the dignity of a young couple living in an abandoned trailer in a junkyard.

“In spite of the war, it was the gentle commonplace experience that intrigued me: the scent of rain coming, the teenage guerillas dancing to a Beatles tape, or a child at the city dump applying lipstick,” writes Towell in his book El Salvador “I became obsessed with this individual history, this ability to survive, this unbelievably hostile place where people could navigate minefields and still celebrate the intimacies of everyday life.”

Towell has been a full member of the agency Magnum, a photographers’ collective, since 1993, and his photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Life, GEO, Stern, and other publications. His work, which has been exhibited widely in Europe and North America, is housed in major collections. He has received many photography awards, including several World Press and Picture of the Year awards, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, a Eugene Smith Award, an Alfred Eisenstadt Award, and a Hasselblad Award. His work is collected in many books, among them No Man’s Land (2005), Then Palestine (1999), and The House on Ninth Street (1997). He is currently working on the book The World from My Front Porch.

Above Image:
LARRY TOWELL
Mennonites, Mexico, 1994, gelatin silver print,
© Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

ROBERT AND SHANA PARKEHARRISON

   Lecture: Friday, March 23, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
   Exhibition: March 19 to May 13, 2007
                     UK Art Museum



Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison construct new worlds through their photographs, on both literal and symbolic levels. Concerned with the destruction of the environment by a society obsessed with consumption and mesmerized by technology, the husband-and-wife team create haunting, chimeric compositions that often feature a suit-clad Everyman who wrestles with the gargantuan task of saving the earth.

The images are striking. A man struggles to lasso clouds and anchor them overhead in his search for rain, or he attempts to stitch together a chasm in the earth with a giant needle. He labors to cover barren ground with a grassy blanket, pulling it up like a comforting quilt, yet its weight—the weight of his struggle—feels unbearably heavy.

“We create photographs which tell stories of loss, human struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and overuse,” writes Robert ParkeHarrison. “We strive to metaphorically and poetically link our laborious actions, idiosyncratic rituals, and strangely crude machines into tales about our modern existence.”

A deep anxiety often permeates these works as man and nature interact in sometimes ambiguous tableaux. Tendrils of vines reach out toward a man’s arm, but is it to capture him or offer succor? A narrow channel opens in barren ground and a woman kneels to draw water from it (or empty something into it); the ubiquitous suited men are more implied than realized by rows of shoes peeking into the picture frame, a line of silent observers. In another work, men fall from the sky with other flotsam.

The dreamlike quality of the images that the ParkeHarrisons create derives from their process, which is part performance, part art-making technique. They construct elaborate sets and props for their work and photograph their archetypal Everyman in place—Robert ParkeHarrison wearing a plain black suit, as though ready for business. Yet, they often add collaged images to the mix, frequently using paper negatives that produce a somewhat softer image, as though aged over time. Often, they create a further patina with paint and varnish to evoke an otherworldliness both real and unreal.

As their collaboration has developed over the past fifteen years, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison have shown their work throughout the United States and in Ireland, Belgium, and Germany. The Architect’s Brother, a solo exhibition organized by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, will circulate through 2007.

The couple has received artists’ grants from the Peter Reed Foundation and the Massachussetts Cultural Foundation, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Nippon Polaroid Kabushiki Kaisha from the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in Japan. Among the institutions collecting their work are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Cleveland Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.

Above Image:
ROBERT AND SHANA PARKEHARRISON
Undergrowth, 2006, color photograph
Courtesy of the artist