The presentations and round-table discussion are being held in conjunction with The Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University. They will take place in McConomy Auditorium at the University Center as part of The Perspectives on the Arts in Society Series.

Date: 27 April 2007
Time: 9am - 5pm (1.5 hour break for lunch)

Tom Persinger
Introduction: ‘Simple’ Methods in a Complex World
9:00-9:15am

Jo Babcock
Contemporary Pinhole Photography and its Place in Photographic History
9:15-9:45am

Jo Babcock’s work merges aspects of photography, sculpture and conceptual art. During the past thirty years, he has created over two hundred working cameras from a plethora of recycled objects. Babcock assembles photographic instruments from old parts, pinholes and discarded containers as topical commentary on today’s consumer culture. Using the camera as functional, low-tech sculpture, he then photographs in a symbiotic manner; i.e., a suitcase camera photographs a hotel, a coffee pot camera photographs a neon sign that reads “Good Coffee”, a movie projector case photographs a movie theater marque, etc.

At this presentation he will talk about his recent book, The Invented Camera: Low Tech Photography and Sculpture (Freedom Voices Publications, 2005), and try to answer the question; how does this work and other contemporary pinhole photography fit into the annals of photographic history?

Craig Barber
Photography and Memory
10:15-10:45am

For the past 20 years Craig Barber has been working with pinhole cameras while examining rapidly changing cultures around the world, creating photographs that are simultaneously ethereal and rooted in memory. During his presentation he will discuss his work and recent book, Ghosts in the Landscape: Vietnam Revisited (Umbrage, 2006), a visual journey and meditation about returning to Vietnam. In addition, he will address developing and maintaining long term photographic projects.

Laura Blacklow
Convergence: PhotoGraphics
9:45-10:15am

With the relative accessibility of digital production and manipulation, questions about realism, as well as the issues of multiples or editions, compel both printmaking and photography to reexamine their traditional divisions as dissimilar methodologies. Historically, both techniques were used, not as art forms, but as ways of disseminating information and commercial depictions to viewers who could not see the actualities firsthand.  Although we still tend to unconsciously believe that a photograph is an accurate representation, not an abstracted illusion, what happens when the camera and lens, the optical devices that provide such seeming precision, are removed from the process? or when scanners are used to create prints?

BREAK
10:45-11:00am

Round Table Discussion, Question/Answer from Audience
Jo Babcock, Craig Barber and Barbara Ess
11:00-12:00noon

LUNCH
12noon-1:30pm
(on your own, see CMU campus map for numerous cafes around campus)

Alan Greene
Steps Leading to ‘Primitive Photography’
1:30-2:00pm

This presentation will explore the reasons and motivations that led Alan Greene, the author of Primitive Photography (Focal Press, 2001), to begin searching for a form of photographic self-reliance in the mid-1990s. Starting as a fine-art, large-format photographer addressing themes taken from art-history and literature, he became concerned by the threat that digital photography posed to traditional photography’s future. This led him to start making his own 1840s–50s-era calotype paper negatives, where he eventually settled on French processes as they also provided him with a means for learning a foreign language. Having succeeded with the negative, his frustration with the long exposure times involved with pinhole photography caused him to begin constructing and experimenting with simple, “landscape” lenses made from optical surplus, sections of PVC tubing, and construction paper. From here, it was only natural that he should start building variants of early box-camera and film-holder designs. And in experimenting with some overlooked developing-out salted paper processes from the late 1850s, his curiosity was piqued because he had accidentally called into question the photo-historical consensus that developed-out prints from the mid-nineteenth century are inherently neutral in color tonality.

Patricia Katchur
Back to Basics: The Renaissance in Alternative and Historic Photographic Processes
3:00-3:30pm

Patricia Katchur will discuss the interest and urgency among photographers to learn the craft of historic processes. Why, in today’s technical world, many choose to go back to basics and learn from scratch. Is it in response to the changing world of photography or something deeper?

Terry King, FRPS
Retro-Invention: A Revolution in Gold and Blue
2:00-2:30pm

A programme of simplification in the teaching of alternative photography led to more efficient methods of making a number of alternative photographic prints across a number of processes. The photographs were easier to take, the film was easier to develop and the ‘control’, which was so important in the heyday of the ‘pictorialists’ around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was easier to achieve.. This simplification led to a re-examination of a number of processes including asphaltum, cyanotype and chrysotype.which we called our retro-invention programme . The results of this research were revolutionary. They led to a reassessment of how ‘The First photograph’ was made. A method of making gold prints that was simple reliable and cheap which we called the ‘chrysotype rex’ and method of making cyanotypes that was so revolutionary that it gave speeds fast enough to use the cyanotype process in camera and so flexible that it would cope with negatives across a wide range of densities giving, with simple toning, colours from dark blue blacks, greys and dark and light ochres. This process also justified a new name to differentiate it from the old process, we called it ‘cyanotype rex’.

Mike Robinson
The Daguerreotype: Past, Present & Perfect
2:30-3:00pm

The daguerreotype, when viewed in-hand, has evoked descriptions of perfection since its creation. What is it about the daguerreotype that makes it a truly unique form of photography. Mike Robinson, who has done much to re-discover this process, will share what he has learned over the past nine years as a practicing daguerreotypist.

BREAK
3:30-3:45pm

Round Table Discussion, Question/Answer from Audience
Alan Greene, Terry King, Mike Robinson and Patricia Katchur
3:45-4:45pm

*Barbara Ess had been scheduled to speak at this event but cancelled her plans to attend on Wednesday April 18 for personal reasons. We’ll be posting information about her replacement shortly.