FotoFocus Announces Fall Symposium on Photography, Feminism, and Politics

FotoFocus is proud to announce the featured speakers and full schedule for their upcoming symposium, Second Century: Photography, Feminism, Politics, which will take place on Saturday, October 7, 2017 at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio. The one-day symposium features diverse speakers addressing a range of topics revolving around feminist approaches to photography and lens-based art in today's socio-political climate.

The keynote conversation will be given by Tabitha Soren and Katy Grannan, two San Francisco-based photographers. They will discuss representations of American life and how they capture the hope and optimism but also the inevitable failures. Prior to the keynote, Aruna D'Souza, writer and critic, will offer a commentary on the intersection of feminism and other movements in relation to photography. Full schedule and bios are below and available here.

"We are pleased to have not one but three distinguished speakers, each bringing a distinct perspective and voice to the day's conversation," says Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator. "The reality is, women's views of the world are varied, as are their approaches to representing the world through photography."

Second Century: Photography, Feminism, Politics
Full Schedule of Events for October 7, 2017

9:45am Welcome and Opening Remarks: Mary Ellen Goeke, FotoFocus Executive Director

10:00am Panel: Still They Persist, with FemFour
Moderated by Steven Matijcio, Curator, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, with Cincinnati-based FemFour panelists: Sara M. Vance Waddell, FemFour Founder and Collector; Cal Cullen, Artist, Curator and Executive Director, Wave Pool; Jaime L.M. Thompson, Curator of Education, Contemporary Arts Center; and Maria Seda-Reeder, Writer, Curator, Educator.

FemFour, a group of socially minded members of the Cincinnati arts community, has assembled a traveling archive of posters and placards, sculptures, textiles, and photo/video documentation from the Women's March of 2017. This continually evolving archive, which will be on view at the Contemporary Arts Center during the symposium, attempts to keep alive a message of ongoing resistance. FemFour will be discussing their motivations and their process as part of this undertaking, as well as examining the nature of politically activated objects, their preservation and circulation.

11:00am Panel: Gender and Imaging in the Online Realm
Moderated by Kate Palmer Albers, Associate Professor, University of Arizona, with panelists: Natalie Bookchin, Artist and Associate Professor of Media, Associate Chair, Visual Arts Department, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ; and Nora Khan, Writer and Contributing Editor at Rhizome, New York.

The many roles of photographic images in our personal lives are affected profoundly by new systems of image production, distribution, and programming. As photographs circulate in online realms-on social media and through digital platforms, where they are shaped and affected both by human decisions and algorithms-can we discern a feminist approach? This panel will address the intersections of images, technology, and gender in both art and daily life.

1:00pm Panel: Women of Latin American Film
Moderated by Michelle Farrell, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Fairfield University, CT, with panelists: Diana Vargas, Artistic Director, Havana Film Festival New York; Laura Gómez, Director and Actor, New York; and Ana Katz, Writer, Director, Actor, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Panelists address the complexities and limitations of the category "women's film," particularly through the lens of Latin American films made by women filmmakers and scriptwriters. Two aspects of "women's film" will be explored: the oversimplified terms of the definition itself, i.e., women writing and directing their own stories; and a less obvious subject, the development of an audience which recognizes women's voices as distinct based on their female authorship.

2:00pm Panel: Woman with a Camera
Moderated by Prudence Peiffer, Senior Editor, Artforum, New York, with panelists: Makeda Best, Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Carmen Winant, Artist and Writer, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Contemporary Art History at Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH, and Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; and Claire Lehmann, Artist, Writer, Curator, New York.

What, if anything, does it mean to be a woman photographer? This panel will reconsider the work of historical figures such as Berenice Abbott and Diane Arbus as well as the contemporary practice of artists such as Anne Collier and Zoe Leonard, probing the paradoxes of the term "woman photographer," as well as the personal narratives that accompany and complicate the common trope of a woman with a camera.

3:00pm Comment by Aruna D'Souza: Photography in an Intersectional Field
What does it mean to make images post-Ferguson, post-Black Lives Matter, post-Standing Rock, post-Trump, post-pussy hats, post-bathroom bills? This talk will explore ideas of how feminism-in no small part thanks to photography-has not just expanded to embrace other struggles, but has in fact intersected with, and become infinitely more urgent and complicated because of them.

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in western Massachusetts. Her essays on art, cultural politics, museums, and feminism have appeared in ArtNews, the Wall Street Journal, Momus, Bookforum, and Art in America. She is a regular contributor and serves on the editorial advisory board of the online criticism journal 4Columns. In 2016-17, she consulted for the Whitney Museum on questions of structural bias and antiracist practices.

3:45pm Reception

4:45pm Remarks: Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator

5:00pm Keynote Conversation with Tabitha Soren and Katy Grannan: Shooting America
Both San Francisco-based artists working in photography, Tabitha Soren and Katy Grannan will discuss their means and methods of representing American life, from the heroic efforts (and failures) of baseball stardom to the shambling lives of the dispossessed who struggle to conjure a glimmering dream, and just to get by.

Tabitha Soren left a career in television in 1999 to start another as an artist. Her work has been widely exhibited across the United States including this year in Boston, New York, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and currently in San Francisco City Hall. Public collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Oakland Museum of Art; Transformer Station; Pier 24 Photography; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Her first monograph, Fantasy Life, was published by Aperture Books in April 2017. In addition to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, her photography has been featured in Vanity Fair; the Paris Review; New York Review of Books; New York Magazine; Sports Illustrated; and California Sunday Magazine, among others. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.

Katy Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Since moving to California in 2006, Grannan has explored the relationship between aspiration and delusion-where our shared desire to be of worth confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity. Her series from Boulevard and The Ninety Nine unfolds as a danse macabre of society's liminal and ignored-the "anonymous". The Nine, Grannan's first feature film, is an intimate, at times disturbing, view into an America most would rather ignore. Raw, poetic, direct, and unnerving, the film is less a window into a foreign world than a distorted mirror reflecting our own, shared existence. Grannan's photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. She's also a long-time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other important publications. Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. There are five monographs of her work: Model American, The Westerns, Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine.

About Second Century
"At a time when everything has become intensely politicized, FotoFocus felt it would be timely to discuss photography from an overtly political perspective," says Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator. "All art has a point of view and may be seen to come from an artist's particular identity, including gender and political identity. Second Century will bring together a broad range of perspectives-national, cultural, racial, artistic-to explore photography from a political standpoint and what it's like to be a creative woman today. It should be an inspiring day for everyone."

"Second Century" is a play on the title of Simone de Beauvoir's seminal text, The Second Sex of 1949, a book that dealt with the treatment of women throughout history and marks the starting point of second-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism built upon first-wave feminism's concern for suffrage and equal property rights to focus more broadly on sexuality, family, workplace rights, and other forms of inequality, both tacit and legal. The current socio-political climate broadly embraces different feminine identities, including queer and transgender. Second Century: Photography, Feminism, Politics acknowledges the absorption and application of myriad feminist ideals and practices at the beginning of a second century of organized and evolved feminist approaches to art and politics.

"Our aim is to encourage dialogue about the world through the art of photography," says Mary Ellen Goeke, Executive Director of FotoFocus. "We're excited to bring international and local speakers together with socially minded members of our community to explore a variety of female perspectives pertaining to feminism, art and culture."

Second Century: Photography, Feminism, Politics will take place at Memorial Hall on Saturday, October 7, beginning at 10am. Free and open to the public, the symposium will include panel discussions and speakers throughout the day. The one-day symposium is designed to be flexible, allowing people to attend all day or the panel of their choice. More information is available at FotoFocusSymposium.org.

About FotoFocus
Founded in 2010, FotoFocus is the largest, Cincinnati-based non-profit arts organization whose mission is to present the finest in contemporary photography and lens-based art. FotoFocus supports and curates artistically, intellectually, and academically rigorous exhibitions and programs that are accessible, educational, and enriching to a diverse public. The organization celebrates and champions photography as the medium of our time and aims to encourage dialogue about the world through the art of photography. Programming includes the FotoFocus Biennials, the Lecture and Visiting Artist Series, a series that has invited more than 35 internationally-renowned photographers to Cincinnati. Since its inception, FotoFocus has presented more than 300 projects, worked with over 100 partners and provided support and funding to over 150 programs. More information about FotoFocus can be found at www.FotoFocusCincinnati.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.