2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageGraduate Student Panel
Hannah Cooper McCauley, Peter Hiatt, Zachary McCauley, Gay Pasley, & Abigail Smithson
Friday, September 25 - 9:00AM to 10:50AM
Oklahoma City Museum of Art - Mezzanine
Hannah Cooper McCauley - A Singular Sense Of Urgency: Photography and the Marvelous Real
I am fascinated by the existence of the fantastic within the everyday, and I use the narrative mode of magical realism to communicate this within my photographs. My upbringing as the daughter of a Baptist minister has largely influenced the method and construction of my imagery. I was raised to believe in the probability of miracles—I learned at an early age to accept the things I could not understand, and today I relate my desire to find magic within the ordinary to the stories and parables of the Bible I was raised on. This presentation will include two ongoing bodies of work I am developing while in graduate school. I aim to explore how these two bodies of work compare and contrast and the ability for each to influence the other as I navigate two separate photographic routes to reach a similar destination. Both investigate my kinship with the temporary as I examine the new identities I have assumed as wife and lover while I contemplate the possibility of motherhood.
Peter Hiatt- Sweep: Finding the Hidden Power in the Landscape Presentation
University of North Texas
In my presentation, I will share the ideas and motivations behind my series “Sweep.” This series began with my search for minimalist forms in the landscape. I found that in the landscape around me, the land was cluttered with man-made structures such as billboards and power lines. I used a long shutter opening combined with a panning motion to blur the scene along the horizon. This technique transformed random, chaotic scenes of everyday life into minimalist forms with structure and power.
Zachary McCauley- Look Away: Constructing Southern Identity Presentation
Since beginning my time as a graduate student in the fall of 2013 I have been looking at my own personal life as the basis for studying what roles place, culture, and family play in the formation and support for identity and world view. My first graduate-level body of work Sometimes This Can Be Difficult explores these ideas by primarily looking at landscapes and found still lives between my adopted homes in Louisiana and Mississippi as I attempt to discover what my connection is to the Southern landscape. I propose to present the link between this body of work and my in-progress artwork looking more closely at my own family relationships in regards to the overarching themes of cultural and intimate identity. My interest is in how these factors work together to aid in the construction of my own personal and cultural identity.
Gay Pasley- I Shot the Sheriff: The Lynch Postcard of Mary Laura Nelson and her son L.D. Nelson
Several years ago I came across a book called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America( 2000). It was composed of photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. It was there that I first met my protagonist Mary Laura Nelson. There was something unique about this lynch image. Allen, the author of Without Sanctuary, described her this way: "The corpse of Laura Nelson retains an indissoluble femininity despite the horror inflicted on it. Specterlike, she seems to float – thistledown light and implausibly still." She was the lone female in a book of men who took their last breath before they were swung by their necks from trees. After years of extensive research, it is my belief that it is the only extant lynch photograph of a mother and her child. Woody Guthrie’s father attended the lynching, providing his son with firsthand accounts of the family’s murder. As a result Woody wrote three unpublished songs about the family’s murder, one of which is “Not My Baby, Not My Son.”
I became obsessed with Mary Laura Nelson, researching every detail of her life and death. I canvassed the historical library, poured through newspaper articles, conducted interviews, and created timelines. My presentation will consist of an overview of lynching and the lynch photograph as crime scene photography along with the technical aspects of the lynch image of Mary Laura Nelson and her son L.D., it will discuss the details of the the image and their significance including details about the photographer who captured the image, newspaper accounts of the lynching and other records as well as a reading from my manuscript in progress.
Abigail Smithson - Reconsidering Agony
The influence and resonance of iconic photographs made by other artists has been a defining and ongoing element of my work. This talk introduces a couple of my projects-in-progress that respond to existing photographic images, including Nick Ut's "Terror of War." I will present work in the context of other artists who also respond to existing imagery as a critical and empathetic strategy. My hope is that if we spend more time reconsidering images of pain and suffering, we might be more likely to stop whatever is causing them to be made.
speakers
Abigail Smithson
Gay Pasley
Hannah Cooper McCauley
Peter Hiatt
Zachary McCauley
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