Keynote Speaker

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 7:00 - 8:30 pm, International Ballroom

The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. James Kunstler's book, The Long Emergency, tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. With The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future.

Urban planning advocate, journalist, and well-known author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere and The Long Emergency, James Kunstler has long been recognized as a fierce proponent of New Urbanism and strident critic of sprawl and the excesses of automobile culture. He believes that we must create more sustainable communities and advocates for walkable towns, major investments in public transit and greater support of local agriculture.

Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. After graduating from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of publications, including Rolling Stone magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books, including fiction, on a full-time basis.

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Thursday, March 26, 2009, 6:30 - 7:00 pm, International Ballroom

After studying art and photography at Syracuse University (BFA 1961, MA 1968), John Pfahl spent his teaching career at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He took an early retirement in 1985 to devote his time to making photographs. He has published numerous books, catalogs, and portfolios including Altered Landscape (1981), Picture Windows (1987), Arcadia Revisited (1988), A Distanced Land (1990), Waterfall (2000), and Extreme Horticulture (2003).

He received an honorary doctorate from Niagra University in 1991 and has been on the board of trustees at the George Eastman House since 1998.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 4:30 - 5:30 pm, International Ballroom

In the introduction to his seminal 1975 exhibition "New Topographics," William Jenkins wrote: "If "New Topographics' has a central purpose it is simply to postulate, at least for the time being, what it means to make a documentary photograph." More than 30 years later, in a "flat" world of global flows, ubiquitous networks, micro transmissions, what does it mean to document the hertzian-induced sprawl surrounding us - and what do those documents mean for us?

Steve Dietz is the Artistic Director of the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, CA, the largest festival of art at the intersection of technology in North America, and Executive Director of Northern Lights, a Twin Cities-based arts agency for art in the public sphere. He is the founding Director and Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center and formerly responsible for book publishing at Aperture Foundation.

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Sunday, March 29, 2009, 10:00 - 11:00 am, International Ballroom

The Jackie Look

Finley will appear as Jackie Kennedy looking back at her images in pictures. With this year's conference in Dallas only two blocks away from the Grassy Knoll, Finley will use the opportunity to consider the trauma of our nation's historical imagery and to be conscious of the healing power of the transformation of our painful memory landscape into new images of future promise and imagination.

Karen Finley is a New York-based artist whose raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited her visual art, performances and plays internationally. Her performances have been presented at Lincoln Center, New York City, The Guthrie, Minneapolis, American Repertory Theatre, The ICA in London, Harvard, The Steppenwolf in Chicago, and The Bobino in Paris. Her artworks are in numerous collections and museums including the Pompidou in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Finley attended the San Francisco Art Institute receiving an MFA and honorary PhD. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim, two Obies, two Bessies, MS. Magazine Woman Of The Year, NARAL Person of the Year, NYSCA and NEA Fellowships. Ms. Finley lectures internationally and is interested in freedom of expression issues and the availability and access of culture in relationship to gender, race, class and identity.

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Houston Cultura: Panoramas and Portraits of Houston's Mexican-American Community (imagemaker presentation)

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Pavilion Room

For the past three years, I have been using digital panoramic technology to photograph Houston's inner city Mexican American community and create panoramic images that appear instant and seamless. The process and equipment I use allow me to quickly photograph live action scenes, get closer to human subjects and interactions, and present a more intimate panoramic experience. I have experimented with the traditional panoramic format and have made the documentary effort to photograph cultural community interactions, and I have also used a 360º fisheye panoramic format to take environmental portraits of Hispanic cultural leaders in Houston.

Jesus "Chuy" Benitez is a photographic artist/educator who has dedicated himself to capturing Mexican American culture and community. He is originally from El Paso, TX, has his B.A. in Studio Photography from University of Notre Dame, M.F.A. in Photography/Digital Media from University of Houston, and is currently living in Houston, TX.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Venetian Room

Brouws has been documenting the racial segregation, white flight and deindustrialization across the Northeastern United States for the past decade. Feeling kinship with the New Topographics Movement from the mid-1970s that explored the impact of the constructed suburban world on the natural one, Brouws has inverted and politicized that premise to show how the devastating effects of rampant sprawl destroyed and supplanted facets of the socio-economic and racial fabric of America's cities. Combining statistical data and visuals—in the form of typologies and narrative images—Brouws's presentation will explore this sometimes overlooked and forgotten terrain.

Jeff Brouws is a self-taught photographer and self-described armchair cultural anthropologist. He has four monographs in print, is represented by major galleries across the country, and has work in collections at the Whitney, Getty, LACMA, Henry, Fogg, and Princeton art museums. He has also taught workshops and lectured at MOPA, SVA, Vasser, RIT, and the University of Nottingham.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Pavilion Room

Once a dominant region for steel production and oil refining the Calumet Region has been described as a bewilderingly complex place. The region, which includes south Chicago and northwest Indiana, is intertwined with numerous communities and industries bordering the natural setting of Lake Michigan. The Lake's expanse is both the actual and symbolic antidote to this aging industrial landscape. The photographs address the drama and contrast of the region, the use and misuse of land, and the working class neighborhoods of these older communities.

Gary Cialdella earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame and MA in history from Western Michigan University. He is a professional photographer and educator. Gary's work is exhibited widely, including the Art Institute of Chicago, and is included in private and corporate collections, most notably LaSalle Bank.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Pavilion Room

Due to the large scale of suburban construction projects, it is easy to acquire surplus building materials such as concrete forms, corrugated sewer pipes and cable spools. Since the 1990s, suburban recreational entrepreneurs have used such raw materials to transform interstitial scruff into playing fields for various war games, like paintball. These self-taught architects design scenario fields for battles set in WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, gang wars and video games such as Halo. This project, called Play War, is an extension of a previous project, Play Nature, in which I documented early 20th century tourist attractions that were based on the natural environment.

Ruth Dusseault is Artist-in-Residence at Georgia Tech's College of Architecture. Her work explores utopian modernity and its various manifestations in the urban environment. It is exhibited and collected internationally. She has received over a dozen awards, including a 2006 design grant from the NEA. Her six-year Atlantic Steel Redevelopment Project was exhibited in 2006 at the High Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions that merge art and architecture for the DCAC, the Contemporary Atlanta and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Venetian Room

The 1950's model of the American dream has proven to be unattainable not only for many Americans, but also for billions of people who, quite understandably, seek a better life in developing economies. No longer can the next generation expect a better life than their parents, with a bigger house in the suburbs and a shiny new car. Places that could be seen as paradise for their natural beauty and wealth of resources are overwhelmed by our attempt to live there. One of the great paradoxes of modern life is that our desire to reside in paradise destroys the very thing we aspire to. Paradise/Paradox presents a twenty-year search for paradise that in most cases reveals the opposite. It is a story of love and ruin.

Tom Fischer is a professor of photography and Chief Academic Officer of the Savannah College of Art and Design. He is best known for his large-format black and white landscape images. His work is widely collected and has been shown in more than 70 exhibitions in galleries and museums in the U.S., Europe and Asia. His book, Paradise/Paradox, was released in spring 2008.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Gold Room

In this presentation, Harper will discuss the evolution of the work that came together in her first monograph, Interior Exposure (Damiani Editore, 2008). This collection of intense and intimate domestic scenes was first inspired by Harper's grandmother, who struggled with Alzheimer's for years. A self-consciousness about relationships, history, and time pervades in these painterly and ethereally lit images.

Jessica Todd Harper's images of family and friends have been widely exhibited, and discussed in publications r anging from the The New Yorker to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A New York Photo Festival 2008 award winner, a 2008 Lucie Award winner, and a 2005 selection from "PDN's 30," Harper is represented by Cohen Amador Gallery in New York City.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Pavilion Room

Urban? Suburban? We need a third term to define the new type of sprawl that baby boomers are creating across the American landscape. Small, rapidly growing communities of retirement and second homeowners are located intentionally away from urban centers. Unlike the draw of economic opportunity or school districts that propelled suburban sprawl in the post-war era, natural beauty is the new magnet. The promise of a life amid transcendent beauty lures a portion of this demographic group of affluent fifty- to sixty-five-year-olds. Taos, New Mexico, provides a case study if this contemporary phenomenon.

Deborah Hunter received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Solo exhibitions include the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the George Eastman House in Rochester.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Parisian Room

Jun Itoi's recent photographic project captures the imitated buildings from one of the city development plans in Tokyo. A small Japanese residential area was turned into a little Italian town. Being Japanese, and spending one-third of his life in the United States, Itoi overlaps himself on the relationship between those European design buildings and his motherland. He also talks about the role of light in his imagemaking as a divider of this world and the world of the dead in Buddhism by introducing his latest photographic project, executed in Finland.

Jun Itoi is an alumnus of the American Photography Institute. After receiving his MFA in Photography at the University of North Texas, he taught photography for one year at Indiana University as a visiting assistant professor. His encaustic photograph is in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston collection. He currently resides and works in Tokyo.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Parisian Room

This presentation discusses Folded In Place, a project that explores how photography, mapmaking, and city planning are equally distanced from the landscapes to which they refer. This presentation explores the use of photography and mapping as distanced means of understanding places that are very much real. Folded In Place finds its exploration of place though a visualization of the map as the final destination. These images turn the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape, by using photography to look at the map as a geography of its own.

John Mann (MFA, University of New Mexico) was born in the East, raised in the Midwest, and schooled in the West. He now lives back East where he is an Assistant Professor at Florida State University. His work explores the nature of movement of place, and has been exhibited nationally.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Oak Room

McDowell made the images in Ashes in the Night Sky by scanning the cremated ashes of his father, and inspired by astronomical photographs. He will discuss the conceptual and pictorial motives in producing the work as it relates to the document and the constructed.

Bill McDowell is chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont. He is the recipient of the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography, and the Texas Photography Society Grant. McDowell taught at Texas A&M-Commerce from 1995 to 2001.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Oak Room

Osamu James Nakagawa's new series of images center on the island of Okinawa and its "bantas," the precipitous and breathtaking cliffs that still bear the scars of the intense battles waged during the Second World War. Nakagawa's digitally manipulated images are laden with a heavy historical and emotional weight. The intense detail brings an unreal clarity to the images, demanding a heightened sense of visual and emotional awareness. Nakagawa's views of the cliffs serve as pictorial metaphor for the tension between fear and beauty.

Osamu James Nakagawa received a BA from the University of St. Thomas, Houston, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston, and currently he is an associate professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, among others.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Pavilion Room

You Can't Get There From Here is a collaborative project by Meryl Truett and Rebecca Nolan photographing the towns removed from the Georgia state map. In June of 2006, the Georgia Department of Transportation decided to remove the clutter from state road maps by removing town names that they deemed unnecessary. This action set off a citizenry outcry and media storm with coverage in local papers, on regional television, The New York Times and National Public Radio. This unilateral move and the subsequent backlash crystallized the idea that permeates their work: the evolving social terrain of roadside Americana.

Rebecca Nolan is a fine art photographer. She is a professor at SCAD. Nolan received a BA from UW-Green Bay and her MFA from UOregon-Eugene.

Meryl Truett is a fine art and editorial photographer whose work is exhibited and collected nationwide. She graduated in 2003 with her MFA in Photography from SCAD.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 - 1:45 p, Pavilion Room

The realities and dilemmas confronting garment workers, incarcerated people and Native Americans who predated the Spanish in the Los Angeles area have been the basis for my work during the last ten years in behalf of making visible the invisible in nature and culture. In each of these bodies of work I have adopted distinct graphic strategies in order to represent people who are not usually represented in the context of history. Each project has been generated and exhibited so that people from the community being represented can experience the works and respond.

Sheila Pinkel is a professor in the Art and Art History Department, Pomona College, Claremont, California. Most recently she organized and participated in an international exhibition and symposium entitled In Transition Cyprus 2006 and In Transition Russia 2008. She has been an international editor of Leonardo since 1986.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Oak Room

My presentation, "Consumed," will talk about my process in examining the influence of fast-food production on American society. Using medium-format color film to translate the saturated colors and hyper-reality of this industry's advertising conventions, my photographs seek to obliquely answer the question, "To what extent has the fast-food industry's marketing and nutritional practices affected Americans?" In "Consumed," I see the act of eating as an act of ideology.

Susana Raab is a documentary photographer based in Washington, D.C. Her work has received recognition from the White House News Photographers' Association, Center, Photo District News, and PhotoEspana, among others. Widely exhibited, she has shown most recently at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid and the Noorderlicht Photofestival in the Netherlands.

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Phoenix, the New American City: A Video Portrait (imagemaker)

Friday, March 27, 2009, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Oak Room

From the Car is a collaborative video installation of Sprawl itself: four one hour videos shot from a moving car into four directions from a single point in central Phoenix and extending into the suburbs and the desert. Created by Betsy Schneider and Frank Ekeberg, the work is a visual and aural portrait: a visceral and abstracted vision of Phoenix in the early 21st Century. The piece addresses issues and questions about what it means to live in one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas on the planet: a sprawling American city based around the car, air-conditioning and piping water hundreds of miles for it's very existence.

Betsy Schneider is an artist and educator. Her art addresses issues ranging from time, decay and the body, to childhood, culture, and relationships and looking very closely at strange visceral things such as candy, placentas and the mouth. She is an associate professor at Arizona State University and is on the SPE National Board of Directors.

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Witness: A Psychic Collaboration (imagemakers)

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Pavilion Room

Between 1983 and 1990, the U.S. government conducted the Stargate Project, consisting of research into the use of extrasensory perception to gather tactical information. While satellite surveillance was becoming increasingly precise, U.S. soldiers were trained to perceive energy, to transport themselves telekinetically into enemy locations.

From 2007 to 2008, collaborators Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman conducted experiments in psychic collaboration between their homes, over 500 miles apart. They developed a specific methodology for making images based on those of the Stargate Project. The images, drawings, and writings of the exhibit Witness document the course of the experiments, the failures, and nominal successes of the project.

Marni Shindelman is an associate professor of art and an associate of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Rochester. Her work incorporates images of collectible animals, altered and archived in imaginary collections. She is the co-curator of ABSENCE/EXCESS/LOSS, which highlights contemporary installation art dealing with repetitions, vernacular objects, and mourning.

Nate Larson is a Chicago-based artist and photographer. His photographic work has been widely exhibited across the U.S. and featured internationally in sows in Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Spain, and the UK. His work has been written about in numerous publications, including Art Papers and The New York Times. He holds a tenured teaching appointment at Elgin Community College in Illinois.

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The Tar Creek Project (Garry B Fritz Imagemaker Award winner) (imagemaker)

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Gold Room

"There are times, when the snow is covering the chat piles, that this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Please don't make our town look ugly." -In conversation with the bartender, Picher, Oklahoma.

The Tar Creek Superfund Site in Oklahoma is the largest and most heavily polluted toxic site in the country. This forty square mile area of northeastern Oklahoma includes five cities with a combined population of over 30,000 and was designated a toxic Superfund Site by the government in 1983. At least half of the polluted land is on one of a dozen Indian reservations, foremost being the Quawpaw Nation. The air, ground and water is severely contaminated with heavy metals including lead, zinc, iron, cadmium, and arsenic among many others, due to more than eighty years of mining activity. Most of the children of the area have been tested to have excess levels of lead in their systems, which cause a multitude of problems including lower I.Q. scores and learning disabilities. In addition, the area is plagued with constant mine cave-ins. There are over one thousand documented open ventilation holes and mine shafts in the area, few of which have been plugged or even fenced. Approximately 75 million tons of chat (mine tailings which contain dangerous levels of toxic metals) remains on the surface of the ground.

In the more than twenty years this area has been designated a Superfund Site over 100 million dollars has been spent to clean up Tar Creek, all to little avail. As a last resort for many of the people in the region, the towns of Cardin and Picher (both at the epicenter of the problem) have asked the government to relocate their cities out of harms way. This localized solution is at odds with the indigenous peoples of the region who for the most part want to stay and demand that their land be cleaned up.

I am attempting to document not only the current environmental problems found at Tar Creek but also to understand and demonstrate through my photographs the indigenous populations close relationship to this land, and that in spite of the obvious hazards, their reluctance to want to leave. I am interested in exploring the conceptual and personal themes of landscape photography, of trying to understand the relationship of land and its people (and especially in this case, its indigenous peoples) and the social, physical and emotional implications of living in a compromised environment, the idea of a sense of place, and "home."

Vaughn Wascovich is a photographic educator, commercial and fine art photographer. He has more than twenty years experience as a commercial photographer and business owner and has worked with a diverse range of advertising and corporate clients. He has a broad-based visual technology background, which includes several years as an agency broadcast and multi-media producer. Professor Wascovich has a very active fine-art photography career, having participated in more than 70 solo and group exhibitions. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas, where he teaches all levels of photography students, including graduates. He has been a member of the Harvard Visiting Scholars Program since 2004.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Pavilion Room

It is nearly a half century since the public's first wide spread encounter with digitally processed photographs, yet it was not these early close encounters that were responsible for the current digital photographic revolution. It was rather, the computer desktop revolution that came out of the turbulent 1970's that placed powerful digital technology in the hands of creative individuals interested in social and aesthetic alternatives, that was the real catalyst for this change. As a new generation and iteration of artists have grown up knowing only photography in a digital form, it is now important to take a look back in order to understand and recognize the significant creative achievements that these individuals were able to accomplish and to critically interpret how their legacy might influence the future of photography.

Since growing up in front of a cathode ray tube and first logging on to the ARPNET in 1972, much of Michael Brodsky's art has addressed the transmission of image, text, data, and self. He is one of the pioneering artists exploring electronic media and digital photography and has worked exclusively in digital media since 1983.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Venetian Room

This presentation extends the focus on New Topographics and the "altered landscape" to explore future stages of interaction between image manipulation and the physical environment. Along with image processing and new media, sprawl has led to new understandings of land-use and may be key in developing critical models of land reclamation and reclamation art. Problematic landscape work leading up to Alan Berger's "drosscapes," will suggest a range of far-reaching questions, e.g., whether sprawl itself and its aesthetics might be in need of reclamation as outlying urban areas become like mining sites in the West, exhausted terrains of dead-end growth.

Chris Burnett uses hypermedia, generative literature, and photography to question how we actively use language in the environment. Recently his work has focused on sprawl, as much an existential condition of signs as messy land-use. He teaches and is associate chair at the Center for the Visual Arts, University of Toledo.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 1:00 - 1:45 pm, Gold Room

Drawing upon the strengths of youth while recognizing communities and community partners as distinct resources, Preservation LINK, Inc.'s (PLI) two programs, Point of View and SIGHT & SOUND, include creative curricula to engage youth in creating media while encouraging them to explore their identity in multiple contexts. Over the last six years, PLI has cultivated the Point of View, a photojournalism program, to promote literacy, peer collaborations, and media literacy among elementary and middle school children. SIGHT & SOUND: Using Youth-Created Media to Explore Changing Communities will discuss the sociopolitical attitudes and behavior among African American youth engaged in PLI's most recent initiative—a multimedia skills training program in South Dallas called SIGHT & SOUND.

David Herman, Jr., a life-long photographer, has spent the last eight years constructing programs to help youth and their communities produce empowering media. Herman has shared his own visual works with a number of media outlets and continues to engage in initiatives that document rural and urban redevelopment.

Shaun Wilson's experience as tutor, teacher, and researcher has contributed to her commitment to engaging in research that empowers adolescents and their families. She is currently engaging in ongoing evaluation of such programs as Point of View and SIGHT & SOUND to help illustrate links between media, community, and identity.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 1:00 - 1:45 am, Parisian Room

Sprawl has been a destructive force environmentally and socially for over sixty years: Enough. We must question photography that romanticizes the ennui of suburban isolation and consider how photography may, instead, be a force for change. I will show how progressive planners and architects, armed with digital cameras, analyze development patterns to extract the genetic material of the diverse, walkable places still remaining. This process allows us to write resilient place-based DNA into design and zoning codes. Thus photography is an important analytic and advocacy tool for the recovery of urban form.

Sandy Sorlien is the director of Technical Research at the Center for Applied Transect Studies. Sandy has photographed American places for thirty years, and is the author of Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road. She teaches and lectures about sustainable practices, notably at the 2008 Climate Change and Urban Design conference in Oslo, and annually at the Congress for the New Urbanism.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:00 - 11:45 am, Gold Room

Today, to maximize the potential for one's work to reach a global audience, artists must have a strong presence on the Internet via websites, e-newsletters, weblogs (blogs) and more. Ensuring that your e-marketing materials are connecting with your targeted audience in the on-line environment requires re-thinking with whom, in what format, and finally, with what vocabulary to maintain a clear dialogue. In this presentation, Mary Virginia Swanson will share her insights on successful strategies for an effective on-line presence, supported by visual examples.

Mary Virginia Swanson makes it her goal to help photographers find the strengths in their work and identify appreciative audiences in today's marketplace. Her workshops and lectures on the subjects of industry awareness and marketing opportunities have proven to aid countless photographers in moving their careers to the next level.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45 am, Parisian Room

The intersections of art and science are increasingly relevant to cultural dialogue. This panel

will explore the role of science institutions as the context for artistic practice.

What is the impact of cultural programs within scientific institutions? What kinds of artwork have evolved and how have artists successfully operated within these contexts? What are responses from the scientific community?

Rebecca Cummins explores the sculptural, experiential and sometimes humorous possibilities of light and natural phenomena, often referencing the history of science and optics. Current works involve scientific / medical imaging systems. Exhibitions include The Pacific Science Center, Seattle; The Biennial of Seville, Spain; Shenzhen Institute of Fine Art and the Shanghai Biennial, China. She is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

J.D. Talasek is the director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Visionary Anatomies, Absorption + Transmission: work by Mike and Doug Starn and The Tao of Physics: Photographs by Arthur Tress among others. He was also the organizer editor of the international on-line symposium, Visual Culture and Bioscience.

Justine Cooper investigates the intersections between culture, science and medicine. Her work is internationally recognized and exhibited and she has been artist in resident at the American Museum of Natural History, NY; the Key Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, Sydney University; and the Center for Medical Simulation, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was born in Sydney, Australia, and currently resides in New York.

Pamela Winfrey (Curator since 1986, Artist in Residency Program, Exploratorium: the Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception, San Francisco) curates music, visual art and performance art. She recently served as the lead curatorial consultant for Creative Capital in the field of emerging art forms and has served on the Ars Electronic panel for interactive art. In addition she is a practicing playwright, has a new musical called "All at Sea", and is currently in residence at the Climate Theatre in San Francisco.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Gold Room

Our rapidly changing industry requires photography educators and students to simultaneously master emerging technologies while ensuring the development of core photographic skills like lighting and composition. This interactive workshop provides an insightful overview of future industry trends and introduces the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (www.UPDIG.org) and the ASMP Digital Standards and Workflows as templates for incorporating industry recommended best practices for digital photography into a broader photography curriculum. Attendees will take home practical tips, resources and assignment ideas designed to help students and instructors keep up with our evolving medium.

Judy Herrmann of Herrmann+Stark advertising photography is a past president of the American Society of Media Photographers, recipient of the United Nation's IPC Leadership Award and an Olympus Visionary. Her work has been featured in Lurzer's Archive, Graphis, Communication Arts, and numerous award annuals. She lectures and consults on digital photography and business practice.

Jay Kinghorn is an Adobe Photoshop Certified Expert, Olympus Visionary photographer, and full-time digital workflow consultant and trainer. He specializes in helping corporations use their photos efficiently and effectively. His presentations focus on digital photography workflows, color management, image optimization, and the future of photography.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 2:00 - 3:45 pm, Parisian Room

Phoenix Transect is a collaborative art project that chronicles growth and change in Phoenix, one of the nation's fastest growing metropolitan areas. Executed under the auspices of a class led by Mark Klett at Arizona State University, the project mixes faculty, undergraduate, MFA and Ph.D. students from arts, sciences, and humanities programs. The project stresses collaborative fieldwork rather than individual efforts, with all participants determining the work's direction. The project demands professional work practices with the goal of creating exhibitable and publishable products. Phoenix Transect maintains an active website and a photographic archive.

Mark Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the national endowment for the Arts, Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. He is the author of thirteen books. His work has been exhibited and published for over 25 years. Klett is Regents' Professor of Art at Arizona State University.

Adam Thorman received a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2003 and will complete and MFA in Photography at Arizona State University in May 2009. He exhibits nationally, is a member of the Five15 Arts Gallery in Phoenix, and was recently awarded the Nathan Cummings Travel Fellowship at ASU.

Tracy Longley-Cook completed her MFA degree in Photography at Arizona State University in 2007 and received her BFA at the University of Washington in 1997. She has exhibited and published her work internationally. Currently she is an assistant professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Chad White received a BFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2004. He's interested in the relationships between the cultural and natural landscapes that that share in their boundaries a vibration of beauty, abuse, and attachment to place. Chad is a third-year graduate student at Arizona State University.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Parisian Room

Does the recent emergence of several new international photography journals tell us that photographic debate and scholarship are alive and well? What are the challenges of starting and sustaining a photography journal, in print or online? How can readers best be engaged with the vital cultural questions raised by historical and contemporary photography?

Representatives from four journals will speak about their projects: Karen vanMeenen, editor of the longstanding journal Afterimage; Deborah Bright, editorial board member of the new journal Photographies; Sandra Matthews, editor of the forthcoming online journal, the Trans-Asia Photography Review; and a panelist to be named.

Sandra Matthews is Associate Professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College. She is co-author, with Laura Wexler, of the book Pregnant Pictures, published by Routledge in 2000. Matthews is editor of the forthcoming online journal Camerawork Asia.

Deborah Bright is Head of the Photography Department at Rhode Island School of Design. Her edited book, The Passionate Camera, was published by Routledge in 1998. Bright is on the editorial board of the journal Photographies.

Karen vanMeenen teaches English, Literature, Writing and Media Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the editor of the journal Afterimage.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Venetian Room

In an age of growing access to self-publishing through digital media, photographers are increasingly turning to the book to shape photographic ideas. No mere vessel, the book is a complex form arising from a rich blend of social, cultural, and material-based histories. This panel will examine the ways in which the book form may be engaged in photographic curricula, providing personal insights and examples of work produced by students over the years. Privileging the book as a tool for developing students' conceptual thinking skills, panelists will discuss approaches to photographic content while engaging with the unique characteristics of books.

Katy McCormick (MFA, School of The Art Institute of Chicago) has exhibited her photographic work in the U.S. and Canada. She has taught photography, printmaking, and book arts, and worked as an independent curator, exhibition coordinator, and managing editor. She is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the student gallery at Ryerson University, Toronto.

Susan kae Grant (MFA, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Head of Photography and Bookarts at Texas Woman's University and teaches at the International Center for Photography. She is represented such collections as George Eastman House, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum Library, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Victoria and Albert Museum.

Don Snyder studied photography with Walker Evans and Minor White. A contributor to many publications, he served as Curator of Photography at the Addison Gallery of American Art and a faculty member at Phillips Academy, Andover. Currently Chair of Image Arts at Ryerson University, he established the yearly student publication, Function, and founded the Ryerson Gallery. He has an M.A. in Photographic Studies from Goddard College.

Philip Zimmermann (MFA, Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo) has produced many books over his thirty-year career. A recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship, his work in included in collections at the Getty Center, MoMA, Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Walker Art Center, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 - 2:45 pm, Venetian Room

This panel discussion will discuss evidence of a new photographic trend. Independently of each other, a significant number of artists are today compositing many frames into one to create a single new depiction of reality. These images contain unprecedented detail and subtly altered perspectives previously difficult or impossible to capture. It is as if a new type of camera has been invented, one capable of either flat or wrap-around perspectives and almost unlimited detail or size. But this new camera is a virtual one, brought into being through recent improvements in digital technologies.

Gregory Scott earned his BFA in visual communications from the Institute of Design. After a successful career as a creative director he returned to school to earn his MFA in photography from Indiana University. His work has been published and exhibited internationally. He is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Osamu James Nakagawa received a BA from the University of St. Thomas Houston, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston and currently, he is an associate professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, among others.

Dennis Keeley has worked as an artist, photographer, teacher and writer for more than 25 years. His work has been exhibited in numerous one person and group shows and he is published internationally in books and studies concerning urban circumstance and condition. His photographs in the book “Looking for a City in America: Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go” Getty Publications, won numerous awards. In addition to being the current chair of the Photography and Imaging Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he is also the Western Regional Co Chair of the Society for Photographic Education and sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center. In 2005 Mr. Keeley spoke at the United Nations NGO Conference about utilizing photography as a tool in peace building and non violent conflict resolution.

Arthur Liou's work has been in private and public collections nationally, including the acquisition of the Blood Work series by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2005. He is currently an associate professor and head of the digital art area at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was the recipient of the Garry B Fritz Imagemaker Award in 2006.

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Off Northwest (graduate student track)

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:20 am, Oak Room

I once lived in a townhouse on Northwest Highway. That's when I began making photographs of scenes off this street. Northwest Highway sprawls 20 miles through Dallas County. It was once the primary route between downtown and the suburbs to the east and west. Today four-lane Northwest Highway has little distinction from other streets in our area. It passes by neighborhoods, light industrial areas, parks and shopping centers. Indeed, things have changed in the seven years that I have been recording this area. This body of work is an expanding document rather than a collection of captured moments.

Victoria Clary is a photography graduate student at Texas A&M-Commerce and holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. She teaches design and photography at Art Institute of Dallas. Victoria was a magazine art director, and has lived in Taiwan, Spain, Germany, Jamaica, and on a ship in South America.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:25 - 10:45 am, Oak Room

The Utopian Wake centers on two photographic projects that explore the marks utopian practice leave on built environments, and the ways these distilled visions are reapportioned over time. Total Confidence, New Life relays the combination of science, science fiction and utopian ecology found at the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona. The series Rancho Rajneesh and Young Life attempts to capture what is left of a would-be utopia built by the Rajneeshee movement in eastern Oregon; a site that was later renewed by Young Life Ministries. Both of these sites attest to the fluidity and friction of the utopian impulse.

Mark Geil received his BA from the The Evergreen State College, and he is now an MFA candidate in photography at the University of New Mexico. Currently, he is working on a project exploring the curatorial practices of small museums.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:50 - 11:10 am, Oak Room

I am fascinated with location-based systems and document a variety of points in the landscape. This approach stems from my interest in mapping, conceptual work, and earlier photographic practices. My talk will focus on four series that deal with aspects of "place." "The Fortieth Parallel" involves traveling across this latitude to each whole degree of longitude. "Markers: History" uses the placement of monuments as a means of location. "Markers: Memory" explores childhood versus adult memory. Lastly, in "The View Home," I traveled to 15 places I have lived and photographed the views from these places to where I live now.

Bruce Myren is completing his MFA at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. An adjunct faculty at The New England Institute of Art, he was a panel participant at CAA's ARTspace. Myren's upcoming solo exhibitions include shows at Gallery Kayafas, Danforth Museum of Art, and the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:15 - 11:35 am, Oak Room

The landscape is constantly oscillating between real and imaginary, representation and abstraction. In Field Office I ask what sort of productive tension can be generated by juxtaposing representational and abstract imagery of the landscape? Furthermore, how can such combinations elicit new responses to traditional distinctions imposed on the physical world: natural versus man-made, interior versus exterior. I have created a number of documents and photographs using sources that include various office supplies as well as surveying and reconnaissance technology. These images speak of the landscape in highly ambiguous ways yet there remains a material link to the imagination and management of the landscape.

Andrew O'Brien is from southern Maryland. He received his B.F.A in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and he has won numerous grants and awards. Currently he attends the University of Oregon where he is pursuing an M.F.A in Photography.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:40 am - 12:00 noon, Oak Room

The Chicago Housing Authority has been implementing its ambitious and controversial plan to replace current public housing developments with mixed-income townhouses. My goal as a photographer is to affirm the presence of current public housing residents as well as to photograph the physical space at stake amidst the uneven and unending development of Chicago. With a renewed interest in urban living in recent decades, public housing communities are being dismantled and displaced. By choosing to photograph residents and their homes, my intent is to give value to a population and landscape that has otherwise been marginalized.

Jason Reblando (b. 1973, Flushing, NY) received a BA in sociology from Boston College and is completing his MFA in photography at Columbia College Chicago. He is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award and his work is in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Project and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:00 - 1:20 pm, Oak Room

The suburbs define a broad portion of the American lifestyle, yet not many who come from the suburbs identify themselves as a suburbanite. My images are an exploration of suburban identity. How can a place shape a person? I have chosen particular activities and objects that I deem to be important to living a successful existence in the land of little boxes. Reconciling Syburban Life is a blend of documentation and fabrication.

Tyler Robbins is an MFA candidate currently studying at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Beyond photography, he enjoys cookouts, cycling, cold beer, gardening and spending time in his back yard with his family.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 1:25 - 1:45 pm noon, Oak Room

The In Between series is a documentation of neighborhoods conducted by capturing the negative space in between consecutive houses. By eliminating the front façade, the focal point shifts to the unnatural mounding of the land that is further highlighted by the repetitive nature of uniformly framed shots and multiple photographs viewed in sequence. In addition to a topographical look at the land, the photographs focus on what is in the space where two, perfectly calculated, side property lines meet in the middle. The small strip of side property is too small for much use, though it becomes most telling of the environment.

Alison Smith is currently an MFA candidate concentrating in photography at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. She earned a BFA in studio arts photography with a minor in Women's Studies from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 2006.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 pm, Gold Room

Will the pirates prevail or do you know how to protect your copyrights in the digital era? This workshop will explore how copyright law has changed both substantially and incrementally in the past 10 years as photographers have gained more protection, but less power because it is harder to enforce rights in a digital world. Issues such as Fair Use and proposed legislation such as Orphan Works are hotly debated and frequently misunderstood. We will review current copyright law, including Orphan Works, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the most current rulings on fair use both from the perspective of the copyright holder and the appropriation artist.

Michelle Bogre, an associate professor at Parsons The New School for Design is a documentary photographer, writer, and intellectual property lawyer. Her photographs and articles have been featured in books and national magazines. Two of her pieces hang permanently in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Venetian Room

The editing and subsequent presentation of our work is no less than the creation of meaning. To simply make images without addressing the context within which they are viewed is to erect a wall of visual noise. Such a wall can easily, almost invisibly, separate the perception of images from our understanding of them. As a means of solving such issues, the lecture will address a variety of image-editing strategies. In the first instance, picture-to-picture relationships will be examined. Then, more "macro," or umbrella structures, will be defined.

Douglas Holleley was born in Sydney, Australia. He gained his MFA at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, and in 1997 his Ph.D. at the University of Sydney. Since 1997 he has lived and worked in upstate New York. He is the author of Digital Book Design and Publishing. His work is represented in many collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 3:00 - 3:45 pm, Gold Room

As the title playfully suggests, we center our artistic practice on a notion of a productive and intentional misunderstanding of science. This approach not only serves as an art making methodology, it is also a potential model to address, as educators, the integration/appropriation/bastardization of scientific principles in a lens-based art making context. We organize our perspective around an investigation of vision in terms of its surrounding historical condition, and examine different modes of vision (biological, camera, computer etc) in order to consider scientific discoveries that have been largely captured and analyzed through photography.

Aspen Mays and AnnieLaurie Erickson are artists and educators who met as MFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aspen holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and AnnieLaurie holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:00 - 10:45 am, Venetian Room

In the past, the ability to offer photo courses to ever-greater numbers of students was limited by classroom resource and the capacities of darkrooms or computer labs. With nearly 7,000 students yearly enrolling at Penn State's main campus, all requiring two general education art courses, we sought a cost-effective way to offer a hands-on approach to teaching photography to many of these students. This presentation will highlight the benefits and problems we encountered developing Photo 100, and Internet-based photography course that we offer to large numbers of students.

Keith Shapiro is an assistant professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State where he has been teaching digital photography since 1997.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45 am, Gold Room

Many schools have sizable investments in large format cameras, lenses and accessories. With Polaroid rapidly disappearing there is angst and debate about how we go about teaching view camera and camera movements. This program would be lead by educator Joe Lavine, who teaches large format/digital capture at Art Institute of Colorado. It will also be supported by industry expert, Bill Gratton. The program will be two part: a discussion of the importance of continuing to teach large format and camera movements, and a demonstration of the tools and techniques of doing so.

Joe Lavine is a Denver-based photographer who also teaches at the Art Institute of Colorado. Joe's experience of going through the transition from film to digital (in the classroom and studio) gives him valuable insight necessary to point out the do's and don'ts of doing so.

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Friday, March 27, 2009, 2:00 - 2:45 pm, Oak Room

This workshop will lead educators and students through a demonstration and discussion of ways in which they can integrate p.o.d. books and bookmaking into their curriculum, coursework, and professional career. First, we will share a handful of success stories from educators who have already successfully integrated Blurb into their curriculum. Next, a hands-on tutorial showing how easy it is to use Blurb's free bookmaking software to produce a book. Finally, Chad will share the details of Blurb's Educator Program, a set of free resources for photographic educators. In addition, the session will close with an open question and answer forum.

Chad Jennings is vice president of Design and a founding employee at Blurb. He is responsible for designing services, such as Blurb's Educator and B3 programs, which serve professional photographers and educators. Chad has designed user experiences for the likes of Adobe, HP, Reuters, Palm, Samsung, Microsoft, and Gucci.

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