Notes from Szabo Symposium
Below are my notes from the introduction to the Symposium held at Hemphill in conjunction with the Huckenpahler exhibit "Mindless Pleasures". It seemed to be a success on all fronts, and bodes well for an upcoming, fuller program in 2009. Stay Tuned.
Good Morning, I’d like to begin by thanking Hemphill – George and his staff – for graciously willing to host this event. Also, I’d like to explain this morning’s format: After a short introduction to today’s concerns, I will ask the artist, James Huckenpahler to I’d also like to take a moment and explain what exactly the Szabo Symposium is. Last spring we held a small fundraiser here at Hemphill to help establish both a new wet darkroom facility and a Photography Symposium at SMCM. It was a wonderful evening, and because of the seed monies raised, and the excitement generated, SMCM opened a new 14 station wet darkroom this past fall, and has committed to host the first Szabo Symposium in Fall 2009. Joe Lucchesi (my colleague and co-organizer at SMCM), and I were already in the planning stages of this event, when it occurred to us that James Huckenpahler’s deeply provocative and show “Mindless Pleasures”, which opened two weeks ago, could provide a wonderful opportunity to begin to layout the emerging issues and concerns that we hope to address with our upcoming Symposium in 2009.
While I’d like to tell you more about that endeavor, that’s not why we are here today. We are here today to discuss how the shifting definitions to what constitutes a photograph are both affecting the perceptions of the medium, and shaping our responses to it’s ability to transfix us. As artists continued to expand and incorporate photographic rhetoric in various art making practices into the 21st century, (175 some odd years from photography’s inception), how we think about the photograph, and indeed how we define it - has become less and less important. Or at the very least – less pertinent. Maybe by looking less at the ever shifting technologies that are integral to making the photograph, as ways to define it, maybe it is time to not look forward, but reflect back onto why and what established it as a viable form of expression from the beginning. The fixing of actual time and light in a supposedly static form might be one way of describing it. The result of the combination of several gadgets and gizmos might be another. However we, YOU – define it might be very well be like the nature of the photograph – ever-changing – shape shifting.
