Tucson Weekly: Southwestern Exposure (March 11

Southwestern Exposure

The Society For Photographic Education Holds Its National Conference In Tucson.
By Margaret Regan
MARK KLETT FOR years has been coming out into the desert to make photographs that document human incursions into the landscape.
In a new group show at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum Gallery, Under Sonoran Skies: A Photographic Perspective, Klett's Sonoran pictures share space with Kozo Miyoshi's saguaro-studded hillsides and the late Todd Walker's mixed-media improvisations on plants and rocks. Klett occasionally does a picture of nature unperturbed, his smiling "Cactus Near Tucson, Arizona, Dec. 7, 1990," being a case in point, but more often he turns an appraising eye on spoilage.
Review One photo memorializes a pile of saguaro corpses chopped up by bulldozers near Pinnacle Peak, a little piece of Eden desecrated to make way for a golf course. Another investigates one of the earliest human markings on these parts: the spiral Hohokam petroglyph chipped into rock on Signal Hill west of Tucson. The photographer doesn't spare himself either, frequently acknowledging the disruptions of his own presence in the wilderness. The lovely "Looking at Three Saguaros West of Phoenix, March 15, 1996" traces Klett's own shadow looming against a saguaro.
Part of the fun of this show is that you can look at Klett's work inside and then go look at its origins in the real-life manipulated desert outside. The museum grounds are a thing of unreal beauty, their watered wildflowers thriving apart from the authentic desert, this year made bone dry by a rainless winter. On a recent afternoon, huge dust devils drifted across the parched valley to the west, blurring but not quite obscuring the homely trailer settlements marring the land.
If this indoor/outdoor experience makes for an interesting double exposure, Klett's own presence in Tucson this weekend will take it into the third dimension. Klett, an ASU professor who is one of the state's best-known photographers, will speak twice at the Society for Photographic Education's national conference gathering here Thursday through Sunday. The SPE extravaganza, focusing on the theme Writing and Photography, will bring some 500 photographers, professors and buffs to town, and offer up scores of lectures and demonstrations, portfolio reviews for aspiring photogs, an auction, an exhibition of books and equipment, and at least a half-dozen photography shows in galleries around town.
Klett talks at SPE headquarters at the Holiday Inn City Center, at 10 a.m. Friday, on the panel "Water in the West," and at 11 a.m. Saturday, with Byron Wolfe, addressing "Third View Project: Re-Visualizing the American West."
The SPE conference usually meets in big cities like L.A., Philadelphia and Seattle, and organizers are understandably pleased to have snared it for Tucson.
"To have this conference in a city our size, it should theoretically have a greater impact on the community," says Trudy Wilner Stack, curator at the Center for Creative Photography. Wilner Stack is the chair of the national conference committee, and it was through her good offices that the conference landed in the Old Pueblo. "There will be over 60 high-caliber speakers...it's like two years' worth of (Center) programs in two days."
Alex Webb, for instance, a noted Magnum photog just returned from assignment at the Panama Canal, will provide a double-take not unlike Klett's. Webb will talk about his work at 9:30 a.m. Friday at the hotel, and his listeners can then hie themselves to Etherton Gallery for a look at his extraordinary color photos (for a review, see the Tucson Weekly's February 25 issue). And there's a third Webb component too, of the pure fun variety. Etherton will host a reception in Webb's honor at 8 p.m. Friday.
"A lot of well-known photographers are coming to town," says proprietor Terry Etherton, so he's hanging a small companion show of works by other SPE speakers. Among them is Dick Arentz, an Arizonan who is a master of the old platinum and palladium techniques. Arentz will do a demo four times over at the hotel, at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Friday, and at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday.
Over at the Center for Creative Photography, curator Wilner Stack has put together a show of 24 photographers from the center's own collections, strategically timed to show the conferees just how extraordinary its holdings are. Called Obsessions, it exhibits series of works by individual photographers--a dozen of Edward Weston's peppers, for instance, and Dorothy Norman's portraits of Alfred Stieglitz.
"Almost no museum in the world has the depth of collections to do this," Wilner Stack says. And the Center will also take advantage of the supply of live photographers at the conference. Robert Heinecken, whose collage work culled from commercial magazine images is part of Obsessions, will give a free talk post-conference at the Center at 5:30 p.m. Monday, March 15.
Other speakers of interest during the main conference include Graham Nash, of Crosby Stills & Nash fame, talking about "Digital Printmaking" at 3 p.m. Friday at the hotel. Former colleagues of the late Todd Walker will celebrate his life and teaching at 8:30 a.m. Friday. Sean Justice, a former Tucson Weekly photographer and Pima College teacher now braving it in New York City, leads a panel on "Going Commercial" at 8:30 a.m. Friday. A seasonally appropriate session on "Constructing Irish Female Identity" will be at 3 p.m. Saturday, with a quintet of Irish and Irish-American women discussing the ways they've challenged stereotypes in works of assorted media.
All this activity does come at a cost. Registration for non-members for the whole shebang, parties, dinners and educational events, mounts to $185 ($120 for members). The bargain student rate is $75 ($55 for members). But there are ways to whittle the price. A day pass for Friday or Saturday runs $60, $70 if you want to hear the keynote speaker, art historian and critic Carl Chiarenza, who speaks at 11:45 a.m. Friday, and English writer and curator Val Williams, holding forth at 7:45 p.m. Saturday.
And if you fork out just $10 on Friday, Wilner Stack points out, you can "get into the Exhibits Fair and see everything in one place," the newest equipment and publications, in the hotel ballroom; nibble hors d'oeuvres and imbibe cocktails at 4:30 p.m., and then stay for the print auction at 6:30 p.m. The auction typically features low prices for works by some of the big-name conference participants, Duane Michals and Jerry Uelsmann among them.
The photographic whirlwind, Etherton and Wilner Stack agree, can only help Tucson's art reputation.
"This has always been a photography town," Etherton says. "People coming to the conference will see what an incredible art program this town has."
If Klett is inspired by the desert, other photographers might also venture out into the Sonoran's beauty. The golden March days won't hurt either.
"It's always good to bring people to Tucson," says Wilner Stack. "Think of all the great pictures that will be made."
The 36th annual conference of the Society for Photographic Education will be held March 11 through 14. Most activities are at the conference hotel, Holiday Inn City Center, 181 W. Broadway, with several events at the Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave., the Center for Creative Photography and Crowder Hall at the University of Arizona, and Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. For a complete conference schedule check the SPE website at www.spenational.org. Or stop by the conference headquarters at the Holiday Inn.
Other photography shows around town include Photography Salon at Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art, 437 E. Grant Road, an eclectic exhibition of 23 contemporary artists; Library Project: New Pictures. Photographs by Roger Mertin at Meliora, an Architectural Gallery, at 178 E. Broadway; Adriel Heisey Sand Aerial Photographs at the Temple Gallery, 330 S. Scott Ave.; Tucson Photographers from the TMA Collection at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave. For more information see the Tucson Weekly listings.

Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives