This is your last chance to submit to the Photographic Center Northwest contest, with the photography world’s most Web-savvy misstress, Jen Bekman! Fancy-amazing gallery director Ann Pallesen is the organizer and is sure to treat your entries right. I say, “Do it now!”
So, just do it, now.
As the semester winds up amidst uncertainty about the future of the College itself, some of my students from PHO 406 (History of Photography III) are preparing for the opening of their BFA thesis exhibition. Both Cougar Vigil and Adam Figliola have produced beautiful bodies of photographic work that bodes well for their creative futures. The opening reception is tonight, May 14th from 5–7 pm at the Marion Center for Photographic Arts on The College of Santa Fe campus. Congratulations to all the students!
Adam Figliola:
Cougar Vigil:
In 1988, I was an 18 year-old BFA Photography major at Arizona State University, in Tempe, AZ. Bill Jay and Bill Jenkins had both thrown lit matches into the straw of my Iowa farm-boy mind that year. My childhood understandings of images and the potency of pictures were simply burned up in a semester or two under their impassioned tutelage.
In bi-weekly photo history lectures, Bill Jay, the archetypal story-telling scholar, was excitedly describing for us how early practitioners of photography were either falling off cliffs atop their glass-plate-laden mules, or accidentally poisoning themselves with gun cotton and ether under the ferocious heat and humidity of canvas tents which served as their field darkrooms.
20 years after I first met him, Bill Jay has passed away. In September of 2007, I spent half a day with Bill at his condo in MIssion Beach, CA (just outside San Diego) interviewing and photographing him for PDN magazine (which can be read here). I also had great fun going with him to the Infinity Awards in May of 2008 (which I blogged about here) where, true to self, he delivered a rather cranky but poignant assessment of the “state of photography.”
The night before the awards, Mary Virginia Swanson (who has just posted a wonderful entry on her blog here), Denise Wolff and I sat with him at Good Burgers in mid-town Manhattan, listening to him describe his recently purchased plots of land in Costa Rica, where he was going to happily live out his days, mere yards from “the most beautiful strip of beach” you can imagine. Maria, at the local cantina had promised to teach him Spanish, and his daughters would periodically visit, he told us. It appears that he has done just that, passing in his sleep this past Tuesday.
During that New York trip, and before, during my time with him in Mission Beach, Bill emphatically stated, “I’m done. I have no more to say.” Photography, as he knew it, was dead. But it was the community around him that had changed, and had truly “passed on”, in a very real sense. When Bill received the Infinity Award, it had been 50 years exactly since his first published piece. He felt a sense of completeness—or at least he stated as much—having reached that marker. It seemed like a good time to sell everything and move to a hut on a beach. He seems to have been exactly where he wanted to be, and that’s not a bad thing.
Visit Bill Jay on Photography for dozens of his articles and photographs of photographers.
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Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
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Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney