In Relation: Photography’s Communities
October 25-27, 2024
Keynote: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill in conversation
with Ken Gonzales-Day
Friday, October 25, 2024 5:30–7:00 pm MST • Center for Creative Photography Auditorium & online
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a Latina/British/Venezuelan art historian, curator, and writer in modern and contemporary art, focusing on Latin American and Latinx art. She has a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and is Associate Professor of Museum Studies and Art History and Director of the Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems from lynching photography to museum displays. Gonzales-Day’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Getty, LACMA, MOCA LA, MoMA, The Smithsonian NPG & SAAM, in D.C. Monographs include Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 and Profiled. Gonzales-Day was awarded a Guggenheim in 2017.
Thank You to our Sponsors
Major support for this program is generously provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Additional support is provided by the Center for Creative Photography; the School of Art, University of Arizona; and PN members.
Tucson, Arizona + virtual (hybrid)
Photography Network will convene its fourth annual symposium in the Sonoran Desert Borderlands city of Tucson, Arizona in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Grounded in the themes that arise in three CCP-organized exhibitions of Latinx photography that will be on view this fall (Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer; Chicana Photographers LA, curated by Sybil Venegas; and Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature, curated by Sybil Venegas and Christopher Velasco), “In Relation” will consider how communities are made visible, defined, and constituted through photography.
In her book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), Elizabeth Ferrer writes: “As the photographer/subject relationship shifted from outsider/insider to insider/insider [in the late twentieth century], the photograph became less an ethnographic document than an autonomous and self-validating form of individual and community expression.” This shift highlights questions of agency, circulation, diaspora, and storytelling that are relevant to the practice and institutional interpretation of photography. Taking this idea as a point of departure, we invite proposals that broadly respond to the following questions and themes:
- How have artists, especially those from Latinx communities, used photography to probe issues of visibility, belonging, and representation? How do their artistic practices constitute forms of activism?
- Who has the right to tell stories for whom?
- How does the circulation of photographs create—or restrict—communities of subjects and viewers?
- How have borders—in the US and beyond—shaped histories of photography, and how has photography from borderlands challenged state-imposed divisions?
- What alternate models might exist for interpreting photographs and photographic practices that transcend simplistic binaries such as “insider” versus “outsider”?
- What do authentically relational, community-centered curatorial practices look like? How are methodologies such as community advisory councils rethinking the notion of curatorial voice and storytelling?
All events will take place at the Center for Creative Photography unless otherwise noted in the schedule below.
Center for Creative Photography
1030 North Olive Road
Tucson, AZ 85721
The conference Schedule is here.
To learn more visit: Photography Network Symposium
Conference Hotel Westward Look
Also visit Tuscon Holocaust Museum (where I have a work on view)
Friday Schedule:
5:00–5:30 pm MST
Welcome, CCP Auditorium*
Todd Tubutis, Director, Center for Creative Photography
Katherine Bussard and Anne Strachan Cross, PN Co-Chairs
Introduction, CCP Auditorium*
Josie Johnson and Emilia Mickevicius, Symposium Co-Organizers
Announcement of Book Awards & Project Grants,
CCP Auditorium*
Candice Jansen, PN Awards Coordinator
5:30–7:00 pm MST
Keynote: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill in conversation with Ken Gonzales-Day,
CCP Auditorium*
7:00–8:30 pm MST
Reception, CCP Lobby
Refreshments provided