Friday, October 24, 2014 @ 4:50pm, Clark Theater
Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment vs. Smartphone Photography
Bruno Chalifour was born in 1956 in Limoges, France.
He began practicing photography at 12. His "vocation" became more serious when 3 years later he had to try and initiate his fellow high school students to the secrets of the darkroom in order to keep it running. He never stopped teaching photography after that experience, and this to audiences ranging from 6-year-olds to prison inmates.
He studied at the Universities of Paris X, Clermont-Ferrand and Limoges where he graduated with a DEA (Diplme d'tudes Avances = doctoral course work) in English. While getting his certification as a professor of English with the French Education Nationale, he registered at the University of Savoie at Chambry for a dissertation on contemporary American landscape photography. After a 5-days' workshop with Nathan Lyons in Arles in 1988, he finally decided to move to Rochester NY in 1994 and research his thesis. In 1999 he decided to attend SUNY Buffalo for an MFA in photography which he acquired in 2001. He immediately started to teach at SUNY Buffalo and the University of Rochester as an adjunct professor. From December 2002 to January 2005, he joined the team at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester NY) where he taught photography in the graduate program as well as filled the post of editor of Afterimage.
Since then Bruno has shared his time between exhibiting as a fine-art photographer in France and the USA, teaching workshops at Community Darkroom (Rochester NY), Rencontres d'Arles, as well as his own in France and in the USA, writing for various photography magazines and websites in French and in English, mentoring students at Empire State College and consulting. In 2008 the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and the Universit de Rennes 2 invited him as one of the speakers at an international symposium in Cerisy (France) for the 100th anniversary of Cartier-Bresson's birth. Since December 2013 he has also worked as a curator/director at Spectrum Gallery in Rochester NY.
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.