Blind Spot: Collapsing Images: Part III: Truth and Authenticity in Photography

November 3, 2007

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Blind Spot is the international source book of photography-based fine art for artists, collectors, creative directors, designers, curators and art lovers. Blind Spot publishes new works by the world's most renowned artists and discovers vital new work by up-and-coming artists. The collaboration of the editors and the ideas expressed by the individual artists make each issue of Blind Spot emerge as a single work of art. Fourteen years old, Blind Spot has gained an international reputation for being a visual magazine that does not talk about imagery the content is imagery.

Collapsing Images Forum

As a counter-point to the visual conversation provided by the magazine, the Collapsing Images Forum aims to give a voice to the issues surrounding photography, and discuss the role of photography in the media and popular culture. Collapsing Images presents three vital discussions led by leading photographers, filmmakers and critics.

Part I A Conversation between Jack Pierson & Jerry Schatzberg (2:00 pm)

Part II Money, Money, Money, Money (4:30 pm)

Part III Truth and Authenticity in Photography (7:30 pm)

This event is co-sponsored by Blind Spot in association with Fred & Associates.

Part III TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY IN PHOTOGRAPHY

How does a photographer negotiate between "documenting" and "creating What is "truth" in photography Other issues to address are the commodification of biography and the viewer/consumer's visceral hunger for vicarious experience and search for authenticity via the artist.

Moderator: Elisabeth Sussman

Panelists: Mitch Epstein, Paul Graham, Katy Grannan, Danny Lyon, and Tod Papageorge

About Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein's photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including New York's Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His current project, American Power, examines energy usage and the idea of excess in the United States. His recent books include Mitch Epstein: Work and Family Business. Epstein is the recipient of the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters, Spring 2008, from the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.


 

About Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a British photographer whose work operates at the point where the documentary and artistic aspects of the medium coalesce. Graham was the first photographer to unite New Color photography with the sensibility of British social documentary, and in so doing he reinvigorated and expanded this area of practice, questioning our notions of what such 'documentary' photography can say, be, or look like. He has published over 10 books, including a Phaidon 'Contemporary Artists' monograph, and his work has been exhibited widely, most notably a one person show at the Tate Gallery, London, and the Venice Biennale. He has just published A Shimmer of Possibility, a 12-volume set of books by Steidl.

 

About Katy Grannan

Katy Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Orange County Museum of Art, among others. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, The International Center of Photography, and has been featured in ArtForum, Frieze, Art on Paper, Art and Auction, Visionaire, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. Her monograph, Model American was published by Aperture.

About Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn to Russian and German parents and grew up in Queens, NY. He studied history at University of Chicago and is self-taught in photography. He was a member and photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1963-64, and the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, 1965-66. Lyon has been an independent photographer since 1962 and a filmmaker since 1969. He was an associate photographer for Magnum Photos, 1967-75, and a writer and essayist since 1973. He is a self-publisher, with Nancy Lyon since 1980 and Michael Hausman, as Bleak Beauty Books, since 1988. Lyon received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, 1969, and in filmmaking, 1979 and a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking. 1990. He was a teacher of non-fiction film at SUNY/Buffalo and at Columbia University, and a photography teacher at Queensborough Community College. His latest book, Like A Thief's Dream, is the non-fiction story of an Arkansas murder. Danny Lyon: Montage, Film, and Still Photography will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until December 2, 2007.

About Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge earned his BA in English literature from the University of New Hampshire in 1962, where he began taking photographs during his last semester. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In 1979, Papageorge was named the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art, a position he continues to hold today. As the director of the graduate program in photography at the School, he has taught and supervised the course of study of many of the strongest American photographers of the last 30 years. His work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in the collections of more than 30 major museums. In addition, he has written seminal essays on Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Adams.

About Elisabeth Sussman

Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her recent exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is currently on tour to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles followed by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Next for the Whitney, Elisabeth will be co-curating a retrospective exhibition of the work of William Eggleston. She has organized a number of other Whitney exhibitions including Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing (2005); Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1991); Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror (1996), with David Armstrong; Keith Haring (1997); and the Museum's 1993 Biennial Exhibition. She has recently co-curated two NYC exhibitions on the work of Eva Hesse at The Drawing Center and the Jewish Museum. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sussman co-organized, with Renate Petzinger of the Museum Wiesbaden, a full retrospective on the work of Eva Hesse which received the International Art Critics Association First Prize for the best monographic exhibition outside of New York in 2001 and 2002. For SFMOMA, Sussman also organized, with Sandra Phillips, a retrospective of the work of Diane Arbus. The catalogue for the Arbus exhibition received the 2004 Infinity Award for Publication of the International Center of Photography. Sussman has been a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and at the Getty Research Institute. She is the author of many publications, including Lisette Model and has contributed essays on Robert Gober for the Schaulager and Lee Bontecou for an upcoming exhibition catalogue.