Environmental Photography International Photography Symposium
In cooperation with Gothenburg University
Time: Thursday, April 25, 11:00 am to 4:30 pm
Place: Glashuset, Chalmersgatan 4 (Note! Entrance from the Courtyard)
The symposium is concerned with issues such as changing landscapes, exploitation of natural resources, global warming and climate change, shifting perceptions of the wild and the relation between man and nature. These issues are addressed through photography in relation to a cross-disciplinary research context.
The symposium aims for a dialogue with researchers, writers, photographers, artists and scientists interested in environmental issues. The symposium is also a prelude to a major conference on the subject in April 2014.
The symposium language will be English.
Program
11.00–12.30 Kate Albers, PhD, ass. Professor, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Accessing the Landscape: Photography, Technology and Place Today
12.30–13.30 Lunch break
13.30–14.30 Liz Wells, Professor in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth, UK
Modes of Investigation: On Photography and Environment
14.30–15.00 Coffee break
15.00–15.30 Anne Noble, Dist. Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, NZ
THESE ROUGH NOTES: An Antarctic Re-photographic Project
15.30–16.30 Panel discussion with the lecturers and Chris Wainwright, Professor and Head of CCW at University of the Arts, London.
Moderator: Tyrone Martinsson, PhD, Senior Lecturer Photography.
For more information contact: tyrone.martinsson@akademinvaland.gu.se
Welcome!
This symposium is part of the University of Gothenburg’s higher Photography Symposium and relates to the theme Doing History. It is organized in collaboration with the Hasselblad Foundation; Hans Hedberg, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson and Louise Wolthers
Note! The autumn symposia are scheduled to October 2nd (Archives) and November 27th (Simulations).
Abstracts
Kate Palmer Albers is assistant professor of Art History at the University of Arizona.
Accessing the Landscape: Photography, Technology and Place Today
Artists and photographers are using new technologies and social media such as GPS, Google Maps, Twitter, and Flickr to engage with and access the landscape. Whether these technologies guide us to a particular place or act as “place” themselves, they are fundamentally affecting our relationship to the environment. This talk will consider how projects from Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Flickr to Bruce Myren’s The Fortieth Parallel to Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman’s Geolocation series propose new ways to encounter the space around us.
Bio
Kate Albers is assistant professor in the Art History Division at the University of Arizona, where she teaches history and theory of photography and contemporary art. Prior to joining the UA faculty, she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University, where she earned her PhD in art history in 2008. She has held curatorial positions in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
She has articles and reviews published and forthcoming in Afterimage, Art History, Photography & Culture, and Visual Resources. In 2009, she organized the exhibition Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies, which looked at the intersection of photography, mapping, technology, and landscape. The show opened at the Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles and traveled to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ. Her current book project is titled Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography.
Liz Wells, Professor in Photographic Culture, Plymouth University, UK
Modes of Investigation: on photography and environment.
In investigating land and environment photographers draw on a range of methods and resources. Through analysis of selected contemporary examples this talk critically reflects on aesthetics, photo-methodologies and inter-disciplinary approaches to researching land and landscape as related to socio-historical continuities and change and to environmental trauma.
Bio
Liz Wells writes and lectures on photographic practices. She edited The Photography Reader (2003), and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2009, 4th ed.) and is also co-editor of photographies, Routledge journals.
Exhibitions as curator include FUTURELAND NOW (Laing Gallery, Newcastle, Sept 2012 – Jan 2013); Sense of Place, European Landscape Photography (BOZAR, Brussels, June – Sept 2012); Landscapes of Exploration, recent British art from Antarctica (Feb – Mar 2012); Chrystel Lebas and SofijaSilvia - Conversations on Nature (Rijeka, Croatia, 2011); Facing East, Contemporary Landscape Photography from Baltic Areas (UK tour 2004 - 2007).
Publications on landscape include: Liz Wells, ed. Landscapes of Exploration (2012), Liz Wells, Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (2011) and Liz Wells, Kate Newton and Catherine Fehily, eds, Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now (2000). Essays on photographers exploring people and place include ‘Questions of Distance’ in Temporary Taxonomy (2011, Venice, Cyprus Pavilion), ‘Potent Portraits’ in Michelle Sank, The Submerged (2011); ‘Iceblink: in search of a contemporary sublime’ in Anne Noble, Spoolhenge (2011); ‘Silent Landscape’ EXIT 38 (Spring 2010); ‘Figures in a Landscape’, Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt, How to Hunt (2010); ‘The Extraordinary Everyday’, Marte Aas, (2010); ‘Poetics and Silence’, Jorma Puranen, Icy Prospects. (2009).
She is Professor in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, UK, and convenes the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts. www.landwater-research.co.uk
Anne Noble
Antarctica and the Arctic are poignant markers of the impact of climate change in the 21st Century. While there is a growing awareness of the fragility of these environments, photography continues to project an image of untouched wilderness that is often unwittingly informed by 19th and 20th century European literary narratives and visual conventions. In this presentation I will discuss a contemporary re-photographic project that utilizes historic and contemporary photographs of exploration and discovery to create an evocation of Antarctica that is haunted by human presence. Through this and other Antarctic photographic projects I am searching for new ways to draw attention to the impact of human presence in and on the Antarctic environment.