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2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast

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Panel: The Portrait as Performance

A discussion on how artifact and process entwine

Friday, October 10 - 2:00PM to 4:00PM
Mendenhall Student Center Great Room 1 and 2

The experience and relationship built between photographer and subject can be as important to the artistic process as seeing the photographic print in its finality on a gallery wall.

Performance art, in its own right, often only lives on through its documentation, which leads to the question of how we, as documentarians and artists, incorporate performance within our work already? How do the performative processes of communication, physical relationship, consent, voyeurism, intimacy, and general process discrepancies alter our own understanding of our work as well as the interpretation of viewers after the performance has concluded?

For this panel, a compelling and diverse group of photographers have gathered to discuss the concept of "The Portrait as Performance" in relation to their own approaches to portraiture. The individual topics range from evaluations in self-portraiture, to documenting reenactments of historical deaths of the American Civil War, to creating intimacy with aspiring models and referencing those to historical female ideological figures, and finally to analyzing the multifaceted approaches when photographing strangers.

This theme will reflect each artist's interpretation with the intent to focus not only on the final product of the work, but also on the experiences and feelings had while creating it.