lectures & seminars

John Bennette

Seminar: Friday, July 21st, 10am

Freelance writer, curator, and passionate advocate for collecting exciting new voices in contemporary photo-based art. He is the former discovery editor of 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography.

Michael Childers

Lecture: Sunday, July 23rd, 1pm

Born in North Carolina, Childers attended the UCLA Film School where he directed student films and began his photographic career by studying with Robert Heineken and Edmund Teske. Childers created the mixed media work for the record-breaking run of the hit off-Broadway musical “Oh! Calcutta!” for Kenneth Tynan. It was Tynan who subsequently invited Michael to work for Sir Lawrence Olivier’s National Theater in London. He remains the only American photographer invited to photograph productions at the National Theater. He went on to become a founding photographer for Andy Warhol’s Interview and After Dark magazines. For Dance magazine he produced many covers including those featuring the Joffrey Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company as well as co-authored a book Bejart: The World of Dance. He has photographed over 100 film posters and album covers, and worked for such top international magazines as: GQ, Life, Look, Paris Match, Elle, Los Angeles Magazine, London Sunday Times, London Telegraph Magazine, etc.
Distortion photographs is a series in Michael’s photographic works. The concept behind this series became clear during a fashion shoot involving mirrors and soon Michael arranged to have movable mirrors built in his studio so he could photograph his work of male and female nudes, as well as flowers. Childers concentrates on the surreal environment of distorted reflections. Distortions is the result of what he calls liquid abstraction movement. Free forms float in a gravity free-space that appear to have no top or bottom.
Michael’s work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Marion Museum of Photographic Studies in Santa Fe, the University of California Riverside photographic collections, the Palm Springs Desert Museum photographic collection, the Chiat Day Collection in Santa Monica, the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts in New York and the Laguna Art Museum. In 2003 the Palm Springs Desert Museum honored Michael with a lifetime retrospective of his work entitled “Icons and Legends” which was viewed by more than 50,000 people during its 4 month run.
In 2004 Michael was awarded at the Temecula Film Festival a Lifetime Achievement Award in Hollywood Photography, presented by Stefanie Powers. In 2005, Michael was awarded by the Provincetown Film Festival, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Hollywood Photography at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And in 2006 Clickers & Flickers named Michael their Photographer of the Year.

Laura Letinsky

Lecture: Saturday, July 22nd, 2pm

Laura Letinsky is a Professor and Chair at the University of Chicago,  Department of Visual Arts. Museum exhibitions include Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Casino Luxembourg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Nederlands Foto Institute; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Publications include Now, Again, Galerie Kusseneers, 2005, Hardly More Than Ever, The Renaissance Society, 2004, Eating Architecture, MIT Press, 2004, Blink, Phaidon Press, 2002, and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Letinsky received her B.F.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and her MFA from Yale University 1991. She has received support from the Richard Driehaus Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the Canada and the Manitoba Arts Council.
Laura Letinksy is represented by Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, CA.

Ken Light

Lecture: Sunday, July 23rd, 11am

Ken Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions. A new book Coal Hollow will be published in 2006 by The University of California Press. His most recent book a text, Witness In Our Time; Working Lives of Documentary Photographers was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in October 2000. His photo book TEXAS DEATH ROW University Press of Mississippi was published in the Fall of 1997. TEXAS DEATH ROW is a look at life inside the death house as the condemned wait to be executed in Americas largest and most active Death Row. This work was published in Newsweek Magazine (6 pgs) , Paris Match (France-8 pgs.), Tempo (Germany-6pgs), London Telegraph, Nieuwe Revu (Amsterdam-6 pgs) and in Japan and Korea, Holland, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, Italy as well as on MSNBC on line , 60 Minutes and numerous documentary films.
He is also the author of DELTA TIME published in 1995 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. This book looks at rural Black poverty, cotton, and the southern landscape and has 104 photographs and an essay by legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses. This work has been published in VSD in Paris, Granta, the London Independent, Spanish Elle with Walker Evans and in the Academy Award nominated documentary film Freedom on My Mind. His other books are TO THE PROMISED LAND (Aperture 1988) WITH THESE HANDS (Pilgrim Press 1986) and IN THE FIELDS (Harvest Press 1982) which examine the lives of farm workers and their journey from Mexico illegally to the United States.
He has exhibited internationally in over 165 one-person and group shows including at the International Center of Photography and is the collection of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian. He has received four National Endowment for the Arts grants including two Photographers Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation. Other awards include the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award and Judges Special Recognition (Cannon Photo Essayist) in the University of Missouri/NPPA Pictures of the Year competition.
He is an adjunct professor and director of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley. He has taught workshops at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Workshop, Anderson Ranch, the S.F. Art Institute and the School for Photographic Studies in Prague. He was a founder of the International Fund for Documentary Photography which awarded grants to photographers and fotovision.org a documentary studies workshop based In San Francisco, California.

Hank O'Neal

Lecture: Sunday, July 23rd, 3pm

Hank O'Neal is a noted music festival and jazz record producer. As a photographer, he is best known for his jazz and portrait photography. He met Berenice Abbott in 1972, and the two worked together for 19 years. He was close friends with both Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, with who he collaborated to produce Gay Day. This is his eighth book and examples of his work may be seen hankonealphoto.com. He lives in Greenwich Village, NYC.

Steve McCurry

Lecture: Saturday, July 22nd, 4pm

Born in Philadelphia, Steve McCurry graduated Cum Laude from the College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. After working at a newspaper for two years, he left for India to freelance. It was in India that McCurry learned to watch and wait on life. "If you wait", he realized, "people would forget your camera and the soul would drift up into view".
His career was launched when, disguised in native garb, he crossed the Pakistan border into rebel-controlled Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion. When he emerged, he had rolls of film sewn into his clothes, images which would be published around the world as among the first to show the conflict there. His coverage won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad, an award dedicated to photographers exhibiting exceptional courage and enterprise.
He is the recipient of numerous awards which include Magazine Photographer of the Year, awarded in 1984 by the National Press Photographers Association. This was the same year in which he won an unprecedented four first prizes in the World Press Photo Contest. He won the Olivier Rebbot Memorial Award twice.
McCurry has covered many areas of international and civil conflict, including the Iran-Iraq war, Beirut, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Gulf War, and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. His focus is on the human consequences of war.
Recently, McCurry has covered Angkor Wat, Yemen, Kashmir, India's fiftieth anniversary of its independence, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Bombay.

Sandra Phillips

Seminar: Saturday, July 22nd, 10am

Sandra S. Phillips was appointed Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1987. She has done many exhibitions, including the seminal Diane Arbus Revelations, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, Origin of a Species, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, Crossing the Frontier, Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, Police Pictures: the Photograph as Evidence, Stray Dog, Daido Moriyama, Ansel Adams at 100 (with John Szarkowski), Shomei Tomatsu, Skin of a Nation (with Leo Rubenfein) and John Szarkowski, Photographs, 2005, all with publications.