Photography

Co-Moderators:

John-Michael Howell Warner, Assistant Professor, Art History, Kent State University

Meg Jackson Fox, Associate Curator, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

Photo Collections Otherwise: Recent Interdisciplinary Initiatives at the Center for Creative Photography

Meg Jackson, Associate Curator

Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

The opening of Center for Creative Photography’s new Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery in August 2021 has been transformative in providing opportunities to develop and present experimental, interdisciplinary work through the lens of photography. To initiate discussion for the panel, “Histories of Photography,” CCP Associate Curator Meg Jackson Fox will reflect on how we can begin to open our collections to experiences otherwise, as well as share a long view on the multiplicity of installation projects to be realized in the CCP gallery’s first two years. Such interdisciplinary projects include a collaboration with the world’s first Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, a graduate class residency on the burgeoning field of “edu-curation,” and the boundary-breaking career of Hazel Larsen Archer and the continued relevance of her philosophies in creative photography today.

Mourning Moving: Death and Family Photographs

Laura Elizabeth Shea, Assistant Professor

Art History, Saint Anselm College

A few years ago, my family unexpectedly received an envelope full of black and white photographs from a distant relative. Surprisingly, the majority of the photographs show a funeral procession and subsequent wake in an Italian town. The photographer meticulously documented the group of mourners led by a priest wearing dark robes and holding a large cross, along with altar boys and men carrying the casket down a steep, winding hill. Once in the town, they gather together indoors and pose by the casket. The photographs were likely taken by my Italian-American, paternal great-grandfather, Ubaldo Zambarano (1899-1950), a doctor and amateur photographer. My paternal grandparents and father passed away before we received the photographs and many details remain unanswered. Yet, as a photo-historian, I am deeply drawn to these familial images that strive to create a narrative of the ritualistic movement of mourning through the medium of photography. Photography’s close relationship with death has long been discussed as has vernacular photography, but not typically of the art historian’s own family’s photographs. What value do funerary images have, for whom, and for how long? What does a photo-historian do when a package arrives at the house full of the very visual culture they study? I also consider the photographs as objects to keep and behold, and the movement of the “dead” photographs themselves, across time and space, from family member to family member, from drawers to albums to conference Power Points.

Stigmatic Abstraction: Geraldo de Barros in Engenho de Dentro

Dana Ostrander, Curatorial Assistant

Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York

In June 1950, Brazilian photographer Geraldo de Barros found himself the subject of a satirical gossip column which questioned his sanity based on recent visits to the Engenho de Dentro psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro.1During the preceding years, Engengo de Dentro had become noteworthy for its art therapy program, which, under the direction of Dr. Nise da Silveira, used plastic expression to treat psychiatric conditions. Elite critics and artists flocked to the facility, ostensibly to lead workshops, but more likely compelled by the patronizing belief that art of the “insane” was uniquely capable of accessing universal form.2I propose that de Barros’s visits to Engenho de Dentro signified something stigmatic to his peers in the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante –a group of amateurs who, during the 1940s, favored a soft-focus, figurative style. Their suggestion that he made his visits with the intention of “picking up some loony subjects” draws blatant associations between madness and modernist abstraction, implying that his scratched negatives and disorienting, cut-up prints could only be the product of an unwell mind. Yet it also seems possible that de Barros cultivated this perception: photographs like African Mask refuse to conform to a single reality. In it, a wrought-iron fence is keystoned and defamiliarized, only to be hauled back into a new realm of signification by its primitivizing title. Invoking the Other in multiple forms, de Barros’s aesthetic participates in the cultural fetishization of cognitive states like disassociation and unintelligibility, ultimately positing the “ailment” as the cure.

Patriotic Protest by Gordon Parks: Ella Watson and the American Flag

Valerie Lind Hedquist, Professor

Art History, University of Montana

As an intern with the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C. in 1942, Gordon Parks photographed Ella Watson posed with mop and broom in front of the United States flag. The resulting image became an iconic representation of the unfulfilled promises of “liberty and justice” to Black citizens. At first, it was considered too incendiary for distribution to mainly white audiences. The photograph wasn’t published until March 1948 to illustrate an editorial called “Do Do-Gooders Do Good?” in Ebony, a monthly magazine for a mostly Black audience. The text laments how liberal Americans “rant loud and long about injustices and inequalities,” but fail to do anything substantive and points to the indignities endured by the cleaning woman in Parks’ photograph who is further humiliated by “do-gooders.” Its publication in Ebony linked the image of Watson to racism in “government agencies, in private industry, in labor organizations,” and “in religious and educational groups.” As it became increasing renowned as an alternative “American Gothic,” its polemical message regarding racial discrimination, embodied by Watson and outlined in Ebony, influenced Black artists of the Civil Rights Era, such as David Hammons and Faith Ringgold. Their artworks juxtaposing Black figures with the United States flag also spoke to the effects of enduring racism and to the hopes of change. This paper explores the role of Parks’ photograph on artworks by later Black artists that highlight the chasm between the promises symbolized by the flag of the United States and the lived experiences of Black Americans.