SPE's Passage through Portland

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Harris Fogel, Stephen Dybas

42nd Annual SPE National Conference

Portland, Oregon

March 17-20, 2005

The theme of the 2005 National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) was "Passage," which proved to be an open-ended metaphor for journeys both tangible and impossible to measure. Following a very successful Photo-Lucida conference just blocks away at the Benson Hotel, the SPE conference opened on March 17, 2005 at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. Overlapping by a day, the PhotoLucida conference was based around five days of photographic portfolio critiques, without any ancillary events, lectures or presentations, save for the usual spate of openings and receptions timed to coincide with the conference. A comparison to the SPE conference deserves mention, especially in light of the growing significance asserted by portfolio reviews at SPE over the past several years. The assumption is that SPE is a professional organization whose mission is to further photographic education, but the mission statement in the conference guide reads, in part, "the society construes photographic education in the broadest sense. SPE concerns itself with the practice and analysis of photography and related media, as its use as an art form and an instrument of social consciousness continues to evolve."

However, as the organization evolves its primary goal often appears to be less educationally intentioned and more like a warm annual reunion of the photo community family, as educators, students, vendors, critics, administrators and artists spend much of the long weekend socializing, learning and hawking their wares, with a bit of networking thrown in. In the process, it has become a catchall for photographic expression, in which the "photographic education" mission isn't always in evidence even though education provides the underlying bedrock of the organization. It is easy to imagine that any gathering with this many students and faculty couldn't be anything but educational in many ways. Of course, there are many bars that might make the exact same statement at times.

Attendees were greeted by members of the Carpenter's Union picketing the hotel over a labor issue, and one sign that I was in Portland and not Philadelphia was that the picketers I met were polite and friendly, and several even asked for my advice on digital cameras before explaining their labor conflicts. From a logistical standpoint, this was one of the best-run conferences I have attended. Through the efforts of staffers assisted by a legion of trained volunteers, the events were competently managed and by all accounts the conference was a success. From the ease of registration to the bustling Exhibits Fair, which had 93 companies and educational institutions represented, the conference ran smoothly for the 1009 registered attendees.

Similar to several previous SPE conferences, much of the success was due to the well-oiled machine of Jeannie Pearce, Mary Brown, Kelly O'Malley, Ashley Peel Pinkham, Hannah Frieser, Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro, Travis Linville, Lincoln Phillips and Natalie Nadozirny, who, after years of working together, provided the teamwork that created the relaxed and assured tone of the event. Importantly, this marks a turning point, since the team is breaking up a bit, with Pearce, Brown and Frieser all stepping down from their current posts. The rebuilding of both the finances and trust of the organization go hand in hand, and the support of key corporate sponsors has remained steady, even during times of financial shifts in the photographic industry. The current health and size (approximately 1800 members) of the organization is largely due to those efforts. In fact, I questioned a large number of attendees about their experiences and the feedback was almost universally positive. Space was the only problem--as every presentation I visited was at or near to standing room only. The conference is now larger than most available hotel conference locations, but not large enough to warrant convention facilities. So in a sense, SPE is a victim of its own success.

Introduced by Conference Chair Phil Harris and National Chair Terri Warpinski, the opening night keynote was delivered by writer Barry Lopez, who despite fighting the flu, delivered a moving tribute, sans images, to the role photography has played in his career as a writer as he photographed extensively while researching. In a quiet, gently paced voice, he posited the notion of photographer as storyteller and listed the photographers who had inspired him. He ended with a plea for the educators to bring back three key concepts to their students: respect for diversity, imagination and social responsibility in the form of Civilitas (Civility), Charitas (Charity) and Felitas (Fidelity). Notable was the fact that for the second year in a row, the keynote address was not the usually misnamed artist talk that has passed for a keynote at past conferences. Curiously, Lopez never directly addressed the theme of the conference, "Passage," although in a discussion of the extinction of languages and life forms, one could make the leap to the "Passage" theme, since it is indeed difficult to explain or explore movement, without some reference, even if oblique, to the notion of a passage. Lopez's message reinforcing the importance of understanding, education and honest storytelling received a standing ovation.