2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageLori Hepner & Jeff Phillips
Saturday, October 19 - 11:00AM to 12:00PM
Kingsley Ballroom - South
LORI HEPNER: I once was at a portfolio review with a respected member of the photography community when my work was greeted with, "THIS IS NOT PHOTOGRAPHY!" The reviewer was yelling at me, angrily, about why I would dare to bring this work to a photography review. I tried to explain my way back into his boundary of the photographic, but there was no convincing him. I was not a photographer. This was not photography! I have come to appreciate that there may be something controversial about my practice that puts traditional image-makers on edge. I now actively challenge what can be done with the tools of the medium that may skirt the edges of photographic conventions.My recent work focuses on social media and how individuals use it in their everyday lives to create a digital presence in the world. In Status Symbols, I've gone to the "top-Twitterers," as defined by number of followers, to focus on status updates as a form of textual self-portrait. Through the development of custom-created electronics that include LED arrays, motors, wireless communications, open-source microcontrollers, and computer code, I engineer the light that I use on traditional light-sensitive photographic materials. Status Symbols resulted in a series of abstract Twitter portraits.Other projects, such as txts & twts and #Suntime #Screentime, also utilize mechanical systems and custom-created hardware to move light in front of photosensitive materials. In #Suntime #Screentime, 625 UV LEDs are used to write the text of tweets and Facebook status updates, one letter at a time, from crowd sourced posts onto cyanotype coated fabric. In this presentation, I will share both the completed bodies of work and the photographic processes behind them. It will be up to each individual to decide if this is not photography; I happen to think that it is.
JEFF PHILLIPS: Thrift stores and antique malls contain an astounding number of photographs for sale, usually stuffed into boxes or tucked inside crumbling books. I've collected hundreds.Why would someone abandon photographs of a person once loved? Is This Your Mother? is actually a failed social media experiment that tried to answer this question. In July of 2011, I discovered over a thousand photographs being sold for pennies at a junk store in a suburb of St. Louis. These Kodachrome slides told the story of a man and woman-identified only as Harry and Edna-as they traveled together from 1948 through 1958. I had planned to post one photograph per day on Facebook, allowing social connections to grow organically until eventually someone would recognize the anonymous couple. Would it take a hundred connections? A thousand? Would it require a million Likes before the connection was made? Would five years pass? Would it take a decade until someone saw their mother? My exhibition, Lost and Found: The Search for Harry and Edna illustrates the power of social media as a connective mechanism that can bring photographs to the masses, while simultaneously inciting action. I challenge the audience to reflect upon the ways we make photographs today, in a digital world where images are posted and shared instantly, but rarely take on a physical form. Are our photographs at greater or lesser risk of the same fate as this collection of personal memories from the 1950s? How will we ensure that the photographs we make today will be available for future generations? When the last photograph of us is gone, is that when we are truly forgotten?speakers
Jeff Phillips
Lori Hepner
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