Marilyn Bridges
September 30, 2005
Worsham Theater
UK Student Center

Ralph Gibson
October 28, 2005
Worsham Theater
UK Student Center

Debbie Fleming Caffery
February 3, 2006
Worsham Theater
UK Student Center

Larry Fink
April 28, 2006
Worsham Theater
UK Student Center

All lectures are at 4 p.m.


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

Marilyn Bridges
September 30, 2005
Worsham Theater
UK Student Center



Marilyn Bridges’s photographic journey began in 1976 when she viewed Peru’s mysterious Nazca Lines from the vantage point of a single-engine Cessna. The series of geometric symbols and connecting lines etched into the soil by an ancient civilization stretches over hundreds of miles and has intrigued historians, scientists and artists over the ages. For Bridges, aerial photography has become a means to communicate what she has seen from this heightened perspective – that man’s respect for the earth is in rapid decline. Over the past three decades, she has photographed Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, earth art, the architecture of America’s native people and the contemporary American landscape. In her most challenging work to date, This Land is Your Land: Across America by Air (1997), she reveals the scars left on the earth by clear cutting, highway construction, mining and nuclear waste.

Bridges typically shoots in the early morning or late afternoon to capture the raking shadows cast by her subjects. Aiming for legibility, she works at altitudes that range from 300-500 feet. “When one flies and photographs, as I do, at low altitudes, shadows lift objects from the ground, and, instead of cold geometric patterns on the earth's surface, intimacy is regained,” Bridges writes. “There is the unmistakable awareness of warmth of contact and valid awareness of inter-relationships.” While aware of the documentary nature of her work, Bridges remains intrigued by the symbolism embedded within each image, particularly seen from on high. “The viewer must get used to viewing these landscapes from a new perspective, encouraging a reevaluation of attitudes and ideas,” she says. Her photographs challenge the narrow perspectives of our lives, inviting us to step back and view the whole, because “without being conscious of the whole, we abuse our earth.”

The photographer’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions in more than 300 museums and galleries, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

BIOGRAPHY: Studied painting and drawing at Art Students League, New York. M.F.A. in photography, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1981. Received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1982 and grants from NEA and the Fulbright Foundation, 1987. Publications include: Planet Peru: An Aerial Journey through a Timeless Land (Aperture, 1991), Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes (Aperture, 1986), The Sacred and the Secular: A Decade of Aerial Photography (International Center of Photography, 1990), This Land is Your Land: Across America by Air (Aperture, 1997). Her photographs have appeared in major publications, including Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, Life, Smithsonian and The New York Times. Currently lives in Warwick, New York.

Above Image:
MARILYN BRIDGES
Developing Housing Development, Arizona, from the series This Land is Your Land, 1991,
gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.

Ralph Gibson
October 28, 2005
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center


For forty years, Ralph Gibson has used a 35mm Leica, often working in direct sunlight, exposing for highlights and minimizing the detail in shadows. He describes this process as subtractive, isolating his subjects by removing all unwanted background activity. Whether abstracting the curves of the human figure into a play of light and dark forms or finding a geometric abstraction in a glimpse of sky seen through an open window, he has developed a striking visual signature dependent on gesture, abstraction and fragmentation. Gibson first studied photography in the Navy and went on to work as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank. His early street photography shows the influence of these two artists, as well as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s conception of the “decisive moment”. In particular, Gibson has been interested in the unique ability of the medium to capture what normally is too fleeting or lost in visual noise for us to see – the poetry of a gesture, an action arrested in time, a fragment of a human figure or a cityscape as defined by light and shadow. “I like to photograph simple things,” he has said, “to make something totally insignificant into an object of importance by virtue of how photography works.” In the 1970s, Gibson became increasingly interested in the creation of meaning through the sequencing of images and found his voice in compiling images in book format. He founded Lustrum Press for this purpose, publishing not only his own work, but that of photographers like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark. Gibson’s first monograph, The Somnambulist, juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images in a dreamlike, surreal progression, hinting at hidden or subconscious meanings. Since then, he has produced more than 40 monographs in both color and black and white.

Biography: Biography: Born in Los Angeles, California, 1939. Studied photography in the U.S. Navy, 1956-60 and San Francisco Art Institute, 1960-62. Assistant to Dorothea Lange, 1961-62, and Robert Frank, 1967-68. Awarded honorary doctorates from University of Maryland, 1991 and Ohio Wesleyan University, 1997. Received numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1973, 1975, and 1986. Leica Medal of Excellence Award, 1988. Appointed Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France, 2002. Publications include Light Strings (Chronicle Books, 2004), Ex Libris (powerHouse Books, 2001), Overtones (Edition Stemmel, 1998), and Tropism (Aperture, 1987). Currently lives in New York, New York.

Above Image:
Carabinieri, Turino
From the series Homage de Chirico, 2004
Chromogenic c-print
Courtesy of the artist

 

Debbie Fleming Caffery
February 3, 2006
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center


Louisiana native Debbie Fleming Caffery makes photographs that are anchored at the intersection of earth and spirit. An early series documents the sugarcane harvest that was part of the fabric of her childhood. The haunting images of the cane workers in the fields, often made in the shadowy light of dawn, portray a vanishing culture familiar to those who have lived with it, but a world apart to most. Composed in lush black tones, the photographs suggest an atavistic relationship to earth and fire, light and darkness. In 1984, Caffery began Polly, a poignant and moving collective portrait of the late Polly Joseph, a solitary and proud African-American woman living in the sugarcane country of Louisiana. Shot in the dim light of Polly’s cabin, these masterfully printed photographs not only capture the extraordinary expressiveness of Caffery’s subject, but the expressive characteristics of the medium itself. It is clear in these portraits – collected in a book published by Twin Palms Publishers in 2004 – that Caffery seeks nothing less than the spirit. Whether working in the cane fields or among rural cultures of Mexico, her photographs collect visual mysteries that always hint at that undefined territory between this world and the next. Her newest project, Deseos Sobre Todo (Desire Overall), has won her the 2005 Guggenheim fellowship and focuses on prostitutes and their customers at a rural Mexican brothel. Since moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Caffery has worked on photographic projects for several area agencies, including Futures for Children, an Albuquerque-based Native American mentoring program aimed at keeping children in school.

Biography: Born in New Iberia, Louisiana, 1948. Studied photography at Rice University Media Center and San Francisco Art Institute, B.F.A. 1975. Taught photography classes at the College of Santa Fe’s Marion Center for the Photographic Arts. Received numerous awards including Southern Arts Federation, Regional Visual Arts Photography Fellowship, 1987; the Lou Stoumen Grant, San Diego Museum of Photographic Art, 1996 and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2005. Publications include: Polly (Twin Palms Publishers, 2004), The Shadows (Twin Palms Publishers, 2002), Carry Me Home: Louisiana Sugar Country Photographs (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Above Image:
DEBBIE FLEMING CAFFERY
PaPa, 1987
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Larry Fink
April 28, 2006
Worsham Theater, UK Student Center


From the start of his career, Larry Fink has exhibited a sharp eye for sociological detail and a consistent aim: to explore human beings as wonderful, flawed creatures. Whether prowling weddings, bar mitzvahs, high-society galas or the boxing ring, his favorite subject is the social animal. Through photography, Fink connects with his subjects on an emotional level, using flash to extract moments of startling honesty. His approach stems from his training in the early sixties with Lisette Model, who recognized the inherent bias in documentary photography and embraced it, focusing on the medium’s expressive potential. Fink’s work is also marked by a sympathetic portrayal of social conditions and a relationship between photographer and subject that is affectionate and empathetic, yet unflinching. In his first monograph, Social Graces (1984), Fink juxtaposes images of two radically different social classes: upper crust Manhattan aristocrats and rural working class Pennsylvanians. Yet, disparity dissolves in the critical flash of Fink’s camera to reveal something more human – the baser instincts of all experience, including lust, fear, avarice, love, pride, hunger, fatigue, and joy. Aiming to capture the momentary nuanced emotion in all his characters, Fink presents the strong as vulnerable and fearful in Boxing (1997) and the beautiful as tired and messy in Runway (2000). In the summer of 2001, Fink produced a series of photographs on assignment for The New York Times Magazine. Stylistically reminiscent of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz – who adopted a realist style to comment on social ills – Fink’s political satire compares President George W. Bush and his aides to decadent figures in Germany’s Weimar Republic. The photographs are now complied in The Forbidden Pictures (2001).

Biography: Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1941. Began his career studying with Lisette Model. Received Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts, College for Creative Studies, College of Art and Design, Detroit, Michigan. Taught at New York University, Cooper Union, School of Visual Arts, Yale University, and Parsons School of Design. Held one-man exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, 1979 and Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, 1997. Awards include: two Guggenheim Fellowships, 1976 and 1979; two NEA Grants, 1978 and 1986. Magazines that have displayed Fink’s work include, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine. Publications include: The Forbidden Pictures (powerHouse, 2004), Runway (powerHouse, 2000), Boxing (powerHouse, 1997), and Social Graces (Aperture, 1984). Fink has been a professor of photography at Bard College since the mid -1980s lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.

Above Image:
LARRY FINK
George Plimpton, Jared Paul Stern, and Cameron Richardson, Elaine’s, NYC, January 1999
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist