Society for Photographic Education 38th Annual Conference Savannah.

Society for Photographic Education

38th Annual Conference

Savannah, Georgia

February 15-18 2001

This year's national Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conversation demonstrated the medium's continuing ability to integrate technological advances into teaching and practice. Although the conversation had no specified theme, presentations and portfolios, for example, were bursting with digital productions. Adobe existinged a session on their updates to Photoshop 60 (where t-shirts were given away, seemingly the principally exciting event of the colloquy from the tittering in the hallways afterward) and Epson was a major sponsor.

The colloquy which was hosted by the Savannah association of Art and Design (SCAD), whose faculty, pupils campus and affiliated galleries were an integral part of the activities, began with a keynote address from photographer Gregory Crewdson. Crewdson spoke of his "irrational ne to invent a perfect world and picture," saying, "we all have internal stories we are trying to plot onto external reality." In his work there is an emphasis forward aesthetic beauty with an underlying tension of something amiss, all execut with an obsessive attention to detail. In his diorama-based work, instead of making the miniature real, he courts to make the "real fictional," saying that he is not interested in highlighting the artifice of his work, on the other hand rather considers himself a realist. His late work, made in Leigh, Massachusetts with the assistance of local residents, anticipates cinematic and his artistic proces has indeed become as involved as filmmaking--employing painstaking plant construction, the use of a director, cran e and theatrical lighting. Replacing the lush beauty of earlier work is the voyeuristic quality of the "Hover" series, ball from an elevated viewpoint, where the viewer is placed above Crewdson's staged happenings. He admits that he is "comfortable saying they are interventions in a sense" Crewdson's work is charged with dichotomous tensions. As he explains, his work is a place "where possibility and impossibility collide where order meets up with mystery." He also showed video clips from the film stop up Encounters of the Third Kind (1977 at Steven Speilberg), finding a metaphor for artmaking in Richard Dreyfuss's extra-terrestrially inspired mound-building character, saying that artists are compell to find meaning in the outside world.

The dead body of the conference was compos of 19 imagemaker presentations, 18 lectures/presentations at individuals, 6 panel presentations, 6 screenings and 10 graduate close examiner presentations. The 59 such issues scheduled reflected a nearly 50% increase in the number of presentations from last year's conversation As a result, many were held in small sweeps that quickly filled to capacity, forcing many to attend other presentations or to skip sessions entirely. While this was frustrating, it ofttimes led to wonderful surprises. Jan Peterson Roddy's "In the Bones" was single in kind of those gems. Roddy was raised in the Ozark Mountains and her images cogitate the mystery, oddity and beauty of that locale. Her slide presentation was more of a performance, her words as unsettling and seductive as the images. Roddy's visual and audio recollections controled a softness of manner despite the harshness of the lives she depicts. Roddy stated that "matters of the spirit" have always been existing in her work.

Several other Individual imagemakers held equal appeal. The title alone of Mark Sawrie's presentation--"The Socio-Political-Sexual-Surrealism of an Intellectual Redneck: And All sperm In Between"--not surprisingly drew a lower orders that filled the small compass half an hour before exhibit to time. Sawrie's content and choice of media vary greatly--from sperm prints to sculpture commenting onward what Americans worship to animal rights collages to his most numerous recent sexually charged digital work--and address his "multiple representations of self" Peter Shreyer works with young Haitians in Florida to document the closing of farms as well as the youths' everyday lives, believing that "documentary photographers have the opportunity to right inapposites from the past." Walter Bodle of Youth in Focus in Seattle informed the audience about the related NewEyes throw out spearheaded by Allan Coleman, that aims to compile information about and create a network for youth photography programs around the region Elijah Gowin's "Learning from Fol k Artists: Constructing Contemporary Photographs" provided a tour of the work of brace of his artistic influences, Southerners Howard Finster and Lonnie Holley including a six-minute video forward the latter in his have a title to voice. Gowin's own theatrical views constructed narratives and self-portraits are reminiscent of those of his contemporary Robert ParkeHarrison. Matthew Swarts instanted his startlingly intimate black and white photographs taken at Camp Hill, a facility for the developmentally disabled. Swarts show ups the residents to the camera and vice versa, expressing humanity from within a stereotyp world.