1999 SPE National Conference - Society for Photographic Education

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Karen Vanmeenen

Society for Photographic Education 36th Annual Conference Tucson, Arizona March 13-16, 1999

As has been duly reported in Afterimage over the past 26 years, the national conferences of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) are often unfocused catch-alls for the nebulous interests of its members. This year's 36th annual event in sunny Tucson, Arizona, may not have provided an exemplary exception, but there were a number of provocative presentations and discussions. Under the guise of "Writing Photography," this latest incarnation provided not only the expected conglomeration of stylistic and ideological concerns in lectures, but a tangible thread of related issues in panel discussions and artists' presentations addressing the overall thematic concern of the conference.

Brooklyn-based writer Luc Sante gave the Keynote Address entitled "A Letter from the Past," which concerned the capacity of writing and photography to preserve time and to act as agents of memory. Although Sante's presentation was not as engaging as his published work might suggest, it set the tone for a conference at least partially dedicated to the confluence and mutual influence of writing and photography. The Featured Speaker, British curator and author Val Williams (newly appointed curator at the Hasselblad Center in Sweden) presented "Women Writing on Photography from the 19th Century to the Present." Echoing ideas that prompted her to edit a book on the subject, her talk was a dry recitation of her historical examinations of this field of commentary. Unfortunately, Honored Educator Carl Chiarenza of the University of Rochester, scheduled to speak about writing and criticism in his artistic and pedagogical endeavors, was unable to attend the conference due to illness.

Photographer Duane Michals delivered an energetic and humorous harangue against current modes of thinking and artmaking based on theoretical and external aesthetic models to an enrapt standing room only crowd. Michals dismissed educational directives instructing students to photograph what they see and to always consider the notion of audience. "Stop looking - start feeling," he directed the human tabla rasa that spread before him, "This is your only chance." This expression of humanism was only mitigated by Michals's didactic tone. In an effort to tailor his talk to the conference theme, he shared some of his photo/text fictions, including those starring pop culture superstars Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford.

The inimitable A. D. Coleman presented a timely talk entitled "After Critical Mass, What? A State of the Craft Report on Photography Criticism." In what began as a personal diatribe, Coleman blacklisted several periodicals that had violated his copyright privileges and admonished, among other failings, the domination of critical writing on photography in English, calling for an international translation program for such texts. One would have found his remarks wholly sardonic were it not for his suggested "Support Project for the Little Magazines of Photography," an exhaustive multi-tiered measure intended to revitalize the "lifeblood of the literature of photography,r' His proposal includes subsidization of an archive of critical writing, the pursuit of an oral history project and the production and bulk purchasing for distribution within the field of "best of" editions of these journals. He extolled the current and potential pedagogical and cross-cultural virtues of the independent critical photography journal as the last bastion of informed speech in the photographic world.

The bulk of the conference served as a compendium of historical surveys, personal exploration and models of scholastic behavior. Historically-based work included Stephen Longmire's well-researched artistic and social history of Wright Morris's photo-text work, especially timely as Morris died in 1998 and the University of Nebraska Press is soon to reprint his 1948 landmark The Home Place. Longmire explained that Morris's ground-breaking earlier work lessened the distinction between photography and text but that its effect was nearly supplanted by the artist's later efforts (produced explicitly for gallery exhibition and not for the printed page accessible to the masses), in which text became secondary. Two other sessions were devoted to the late photographers Frederick Sommer and Todd Walker. Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro, curator at the Kinsey institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, gave a formulaic account of the classification protocols of the Institute sparked by abundant illustrations. She explained that the notion of "archeology" overrides all other ideological hierarchy at the Institute, creating an archive of images whose cultural contexts have been lost in their transfer to mere data.

SPE board member Valerie Mendoza moderated an engaging performative panel of women storytellers, comprised of four California artists who incorporate narrative forms and techniques in their imagemaking processes. In a panel entitled "Catalytic Intermingling of Language and Image," artists Lynn Estomin, Patrick Nagatani and Margaret Stratton spoke of the complex conceptual exchange that occurs when text and language are combined with photography, examining both the harmony and potential conflict that results. Ann Fessler, best known for her artists' books and photo/text installations, screened her latest video, Cliff and Hazel, a personal documentary of the adopted artist's poignant relationship with her anti-women's liberation mother, a woman as much a product of her generation as the artist is of hers. In the panel "Neither Here nor There: Constructing Irish Female Identity," artists Ann Curran, Angela Kelly and Mary Ann Nilsson explored the effect of their ethnic heritage on their artistic and emotional lives and scholar Catherine Candy explored the early suffrage work of Irish activist Margaret Cousins. A panel on "Creating Community" served to exemplify the photographic and video documentation of otherwise insular communities ranging from Vincent Cianni's work with New York City skateboarders to Lauren Piperno's experience with performers exploring gender issues.