2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageNew Paradigms in Portraiture
June T. Sanders $ Clara DeWeese: Jenny Jacklyn-Stratton
Saturday, March 21 - 9:00AM to 11:00AM
Athens
Portraiture, and the contemporary photo series, lives inside a long history of extraction — A lineage of entering othered communities for the extractable aesthetic value they hold. The rural, the impoverished, the south, the other, are all formed in the image of the disparate — created by a lust in urban areas for an authentic, provincial image — while creatives in those communities are often disregarded and only seen as serious or aesthetically advanced once they have chosen to assimilate to the urban, the academic, or the high-brow. How do we as artists grapple with this reality, and ask ourselves questions about our own intentions with a project, a portrait, or an attraction to a community? How do we investigate our aesthetic lust for the seemingly abnormal photographic image? How do we ask what it would mean for photographers to not only photograph in their own communities, but to stay with them, and to ultimately make work for them? What would it mean to engage in a community of exchange, with artists outside of the urban or academic? What do those in the rural have to teach us about relational aesthetics? Community values? Ways of looking, seeing, and making?
New Paradigms in portraiture invites photographers, community members, anti-scholars, teachers, and wayward thinkers centered in the rural and other non-metropolitan communities to submit essays, presentations, projects, and hybrid/alternative materials centered around these concepts and themes.
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