A. D. Coleman
Art and Perturbation: Social Responsibility and the Photographer
Exploring the question(s) of what social responsibility a photographer has, using three examples: Jerry Uelsmann, Robert Frank, and W. Eugene Smith.
Thursday, 19 September, 2019 — 7:00-8:30 PM
Co-sponsored by Sweethaven Gallery and Firehouse Center for the Arts
Photo © Harris Fogel 2018
A. D. Coleman has published 8 books and more than 2500 essays on photography and related subjects. Formerly a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer, Coleman has contributed to such periodicals as ARTnews, Art On Paper, and Technology Review. His syndicated essays on mass media, new communication technologies, art, and photography have been featured in such periodicals as Juliet Art Magazine(Italy), European Photography (Germany), and Art Today (China). His work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries.
Since 1995, Coleman has served as Publisher and Executive Director of The Nearby Café, a multi-subject electronic magazine where his widely read blog on photography, “Photocritic International,” appears. He also founded and directs the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, the most extensive online database ever created of writing about photography by authors past and present. With John Alley, he co-directs The New Eyes Project, an online resource for everyone teaching photography to young people.
Coleman — who lectures, teaches and publishes widely both here and abroad — has appeared on NPR, PBS, CBS and the BBC. A Getty Museum Guest Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Foundation, he was honored in 1996 as the Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Creative Photography.
American Photo named Coleman one of “the 100 most important people in photography in 1998.” In 2002 he received the Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society — the first critic of photography ever so honored. In 2010 he received the J. Dudley Johnston Award for “lifetime achievement in writing about photography,” from the Royal Photographic Society (UK). In 2014 he received the Insight Award from the Society for Photographic Education. In 2015 he received the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) Award for Research About Journalism, as well as The Photo Review Award for Outstanding Contributions to Photography.
Coleman’s first major curatorial effort, Saga: the Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, made its debut in both book and exhibition form in September 2005 and now tours internationally. A second museum-scale curatorial project, China: Insights, premiered in spring 2008 and continues to tour the U.S. He also curates smaller exhibitions for such venues as See+ Art Space/Gallery in Beijing and the Dali International Photography Exhibition in Dali, China. Since 2005, exhibitions that Coleman has curated have opened at museums and galleries in Canada, China, Finland, Italy, Rumania, Slovakia, and the U.S.
In 2018 Coleman celebrated 50 years of continuous production as working critic, historian, and theorist.
RAFFLE
There will be a raffle at the end of the lecture for:
poetic license / poetic justice.
by
A multifaceted set of lively writings by two poet-intellectuals about the veracity of an avant-garde essay by a third, regarding realities within a publishing house run by the parents of one of them, this author.
Coleman’s family founded a leftist press. He and David Antin worked there. Antin wrote about it. Coleman took issue and created poetic license / poetic justice. Charles Bernstein commented.
And Coleman, with deepest reverence, presents us with his obituaries of both parents, too.
1 ticket for $1 — 5 tickets for $4 — 10 tickets for $8
Lecture followed by Q&A
Date: Thursday, 19 September, 2019
Time: 7:00-8:30 PM
Prices: Adults ($10), Students ($5) Plus $2 processing charge.
From Personal to Universal — Photographs by Rania Matar
Wednesday 20 November, 2019 — 7:00-8:30 PM
Co-sponsored by Sweethaven Gallery and Firehouse Center for the Arts
Sara and Samira – Bourj El Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut Lebanon, 2018
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, she studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops. Matar started teaching photography in 2009 and offered summer photography workshops to teenage girls in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps with the assistance of non-governmental organizations. She now teaches Personal Documentary Photography, and Portrait and Identity at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and regularly offers talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad. In the winter/spring of 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, through a Mellon Foundation Grant and was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
Matar’s work focuses on girls and women. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative informs her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring both sides of this identity: addressing issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs mining female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from. Her work has won several awards, has been featured in numerous publications, and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her images are in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide and can be seen at www.raniamatar.com.
© Dominic Chavez
Lecture followed by Q&A
Date: Wednesday, 20 November, 2019
Time: 7:00-8:30 PM
Prices: Adults ($10), Students ($5) Plus $2 processing charge.
RAFFLE
There will be a raffle at the end of the lecture for:
A Girl and Her Room
Published by UMBRAGE EDITIONS
Essays by SUSAN MINOT and ANNE TUCKER
1 ticket for $1 — 5 tickets for $4 — 10 tickets for $8
About the book
Award-winning photographer Rania Matar’s A Girl and Her Room reveals the lives of girls from two disparate worlds – The U.S. and Lebanon. Set in the girls’ bedrooms – which range from spartan cleanliness to chaotic disarray – these portraits offer an insider’s perspective of not just who these young women are, but the physical spaces that prove to be extensions of their identities.
A Girl and Her Room is RANIA MATAR’s second book. Her first book, Ordinary Lives, was published in 2009.
SUSAN MINOT’s first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Rapture, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, and Poems 4 A.M., and wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty.
ANNE TUCKER is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a department she founded in 1976, and has authored a number of books.
May 2012 • ISBN 978-1-884167-76-8 • UMBRAGE EDITIONS • Hardcover • 9 x 12 inches • 140 pages • color photographs
The Fine Art of Documentary: Why beautiful pictures of war, poverty, and disease matter.
Presented by Glenn Ruga, Founder and Director, Social Documentary Network and Executive Editor, ZEKE Magazine,
and Barbara Ayotte, Communications Director, Social Documentary Network Editor, ZEKE Magazine.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020 — 7:00-8:30 PM
Co-sponsored by Sweethaven Gallery and Firehouse Center for the Arts
Photo © 2016 Amilton Neves from “Godmothers of War”
For eleven years, the Social Documentary Network (SDN) has been presenting powerful, and often beautiful, photographs of both challenging and uplifting situations around the world. The uplifting work often explores the grace of indigenous cultures, the majesty of the natural environment, or the day-to-day lives of ordinary people around the world.
The challenging work presented on SDN explores poverty, disease, environmental degradation, war, migration, and many others. Why does it matter that a photograph of a malnourished child is composed well, or that a photograph of a migrant family camping in the mud on the Serbian/Hungarian border uses black and white tonality in a masterful way? Aren’t the facts presented by the photos in such cases what is most important? Does form matter when the subject is about life and death?
Glenn Ruga and Barbara Ayotte will make a compelling argument why form matters, why art matters, and why it is a disservice to the issues being explored to only focus on the raw facts visible on the surface and not to also honor the integrity of a photograph created with the talent and skill of an artist who has organized these elements into a meaningful, and often beautiful, composition.
Launched in October 2008, the SDN website today has presented more than 3,200 compelling online exhibits submitted to the site by more than 2,000 photographers from all corners of the globe documenting issues as diverse as the effects of modernization on Kathmandu, homelessness in the U.S., the consequences of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta, and reconciliation in Rwanda. All photographers on SDN share a common curiosity about the human condition and a strong desire to communicate their insights through words and photographs.
In 2015, SDN launched ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary, a print and digital publication presenting the best work from the SDN website combined with in-depth articles written by journalists exploring in greater detail the themes presented by the photographers.
RAFFLE
There will be a raffle at the end of the lecture for:
ZEKE
With ZEKE magazine you get the best of global documentary photography delivered to your door, and to your digital device, twice a year. Each issue presents outstanding photography from the Social Documentary Network on topics as diverse as the war in Syria, the European migration crisis, the Bangladesh garment industry, and other issues of global concern.
Two year subscription — $35 value.
1 ticket for $1 — 5 tickets for $4 — 10 tickets for $8
Lecture followed by Q&A
Date: Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Time: 7:00-8:30 PM
Prices: Adults ($10), Students ($5) Plus $2 processing charge.