Kenro Izu
   Lecture: Friday, October 5, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                 [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: September 14 to October 21, 2007
                     UK Art Museum

John Loengard
   Lecture: Friday, November 2, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                  [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: October 26, 2007 to January 6, 2008 
                     UK Art Museum

Judith Joy Ross
   Lecture: Friday, January 25, 2008, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center  
                 [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
   Exhibition: January 11 to March 9, 2008
                     UK Art Museum

Susan Meiselas
    Lecture: NEW DATE: Friday, April 11, 2008, 4:00 pm
                  Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
                  [Limestone St. & Euclid Ave.]
    Exhibition: March 14 to May 4, 2008
                      UK Art Museum


Links to:
2003 - 2004 May Lecture Series
2004 - 2005 May Lecture Series
2005 - 2006 May Lecture Series
2006 - 2007 May Lecture Series

KENRO IZU

Lecture: Friday, October 5, 2007, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Exhibition: September 14 to October 2, 2007
                     UK Art Museum




Kenro Izu’s photographs of the world’s sacred places invite the viewer to slow down, enter into a state of contemplation, and consider the illusion of permanence in the physical world. His travels have taken him as far afield as Mexico, the British Isles, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, India, China, Thailand, Tibet and Cambodia. His quest is no less than to capture the spiritual resonance of the ancient monuments he photographs, the lingering imprint of the prayers they have heard through the ages, the presences they have witnessed.

Izu’s method of working reifies the meditative quality of his photographs. He had a view camera modified to take 14 x 20-inch sheet film. He contact-prints the resulting negatives onto watercolor paper that he hand-coats with a platinum-palladium emulsion. The process takes three days. The prints, warm-toned and minutely nuanced, bear witness to their own journey of creation.

This is not to imply that Izu is not of this world. A Japanese native, he came to New York in 1970 as a college student on a break; within four years, he opened his own commercial studio in the city. He is also a humanitarian. On a 1995 trip to the ancient capitol of Angkor, in Cambodia, he was so horrified to witness the countless number of children in the region who had been wounded and maimed by land mines—and the lack of medical care for the poor—that he created plans and raised funds to establish the Angkor Hospital for Children, founding the organization Friends Without a Border to support the project. Since opening in 1999, the hospital has treated more than four hundred thousand children, and has added programs to train medical personnel and conduct health-education outreach in the region.

Above Image: KENRO IZU, Borobudur #15, Indonesia, 1996, Platinum-Palladium print,
© Kenro Izu

JOHN LOENGARD

Lecture: Friday, November 2, 2007, 4:00 pm
                Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Exhibition: October 26, 2007 to January 6, 2008 
                     UK Art Museum



John Loengard was still a student at Harvard when he made an impromptu portrait of T.S. Eliot the morning after a poetry lecture. He caught Eliot with his head bowed, elbows on knees, eyes directed somewhere between wool-clad legs. One hand rises as though to stop us from coming too close.

The poet is a picture of containment, with his indrawn elbows, starched cuffs, and downcast face. The uneven parting in his slicked-down hair is the one hint of vulnerability, of human foible. Seeing this photograph a half-century after its making, it is clear why Life magazine was so interested in Loengard that it offered him a freelance assignment before he even graduated. In 1961, he joined the staff as a photographer and went on to create striking photo-essays on subjects as diverse as Shaker life in the 1960s, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and American cowboys.

Loengard worked as a news photographer for Life, covering events of the times, yet what remains in the memory is the astounding range of prominent artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers who have passed before his lens and left behind an engram of themselves, from Maya Angelou to Brassaï, Shelby Foote to Annie Leibovitz. Always, Loengard seeks the telling detail that makes the sitter somehow more real, often more human to us.

Life ended its initial incarnation as a weekly in 1972, and Loengard went on to become the picture editor of a new magazine:People. He returned, again as a picture editor, to the relaunched monthly version of Life, from 1978 to 1987; in subsequent years, he has worked as photographer, editor, and erudite writer on photography.

Above Image: JOHN LOENGARD, Brassaï, Paris, 1981, gelatin silver photograph, © John Loengard, courtesy of the artist

 

JUDITH JOY ROSS

Lecture: Friday, January 25, 2008, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Exhibition: January 11 to March 9, 2008
                     UK Art Museum



Photographer Judith Joy Ross once asked her mother how she managed to cope when Ross and her two brothers misbehaved, nearly driving her crazy. “She replied that she would just look at us very, very hard—not to stare us down, but rather to look and look until she truly saw us, and who we really were to her,” Ross says.

It is exactly this quality, this desire to see with understanding rather than judgment, that distinguishes Ross’s portraits, whether she is photographing schoolchildren in all their glorious individuality and heartbreaking vulnerability, or National Guard soldiers about to go off to the Gulf War, or, in her most recent series, protesters of the Iraq War.

Working with an old-fashioned view camera that produces 8 x 10 negatives, Ross must disappear under a black cloth, somewhat like a magician, to focus and make her exposure. The unwieldy equipment and film plates make it unlikely that her subjects could be taken unaware; rather, she asks permission to photograph, and allows her subjects to reveal themselves to her.

At first glance, the straightforward images of people centered in the frame belie their complexity. Often, the space they inhabit is not clearly defined, leaving the viewer without environmental clues to identity. We are left, instead, to read their faces, in a type of portraiture that has become suspect in the postmodern age. “Ross portrays nothing less than our common existential condition—that often terrible psychological sense of being alone in an indifferent world, and having to create meaning for our lives,” observes Susan Kismaric, photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Above Image: JUDITH JOY ROSS, Annie Hasz, Easton, Pennsylvania, 2007, gold-toned gelatin silver print, ©Judith Joy Ross, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

SUSAN MEISELAS

Lecture: Friday, March 28, 2008, 4:00 pm
                 Worsham Theater, UK Student Center
Exhibition: March 14 to May 4, 2008
                     UK Art Museum



Photojournalist Susan Meiselas has never been content with the easy answer or the image that lies too close to the surface. A passion for human rights is at the center of her work—whether she is telling the story of carnival strippers who exist as a living sideshow at county fairs, or uncovering evidence of Saddam Hussein’s brutal campaign to annihilate ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq.

For the series Carnival Strippers, published in 1976, Meiselas spent three summers traveling with the women, not only photographing them, but interviewing them and the people who shared their lives: boyfriends, managers, customers. In her innovative book, she wove together a narrative of these voices with her images of the women’s lives.

Meiselas, a member of the international photographers’ cooperative Magnum, is best known for her award-winning coverage of Central America. In 1978 and 1979, she photographed the civil war between the Somoza dictatorship and Sandanista rebels, resulting in the book Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 (1981). In the 1980s, she went on to cover the civil war in El Salvador and the terror inflicted by the right-wing death squads; her photographs of the uncovered graves of four murdered American nuns spurred congressional investigations into the United States’s role in the war.

Perhaps her most ambitious project to date has been the 1997 book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. After being asked to document the exhumation of mass graves as evidence of Hussein’s genocide of Kurds, Meiselas went on to spend six years to produce an unconventional cultural history of the Kurds, an ethnic group that inhabits parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union. The project, which continues on a related web site, employs documents ranging from family photos and accounts by early travelers to maps, government reports, letters, and advertisements.

Above Image: SUSAN MEISELAS, Lena on the Bally Box, Essex Junction, Vermont, 1973, from the series and book, Carnival Strippers, 1976, gelatin silver print, © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos