Robert Dawson and Joseph Marotta
Saturday, November 04 - 7:30PM to 9:00PM
Lake Room, Granlibakken Conference Center
Join us for presentations from and about our esteemed Honored Educators:
• Robert Dawson from the West
• Joseph Marotta from the Southwest
Robert Dawson: Learning for Life
My mother was a first grade school teacher for most of her adult life. I inherited my love of learning from her. I spent most of my adult life teaching university students about creativity and photography. I have spent the last twenty-five years looking at the importance of libraries, learning and literacy throughout the United States and now throughout the world. After I published "The Public Library: A Photographic Essay" in 2014 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow me to photograph libraries and literacy in one of the least literate places in the country - Stockton and San Joaquin County, CA. I am taking what I have learned from American libraries and expanding this to my current project called The Global Library Project. My presentation will provide an overview of my career in teaching and how I came to understand the fundamental importance of access to learning and education as a way to provide literacy and hope to people who sometimes have neither.
Joseph Marotta: Photography and the loss of the Romantic in the digital age
Photography came about in the Romantic Period of history; a period of expression that emphasized imagination over reason, and emotions over logic. Goya, Gericault, Delacroix, Byron, Shelley, Beethoven, and Chopin worked during this time. Photography's connection to the romantic can be seen in the work of Fox Talbot, Marville, Kasebier, Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, and Lange. Cartier-Bresson wrote," to take a photograph...is to put one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis." From 'taking' the picture to making the print, photography is concerned with the romantic notion of anticipation. Doris Lessing wrote, "The anticipation of pleasure is pleasure itself." She was writing about love but that same emotion is part of film-based photography. I believe the idea of the romantic has been lost with the shift to the transitory nature of digital image-making. This talk will explore this change in photographic practice.
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.