Now, What is Photography?
ART TALK with Colby Caldwell, Vesna Pavlović and Lucian Perkins
Wednesday, June 8, 2022 | 6:30 PM
Seating is Limited, Registration Required. This event is currently at capacity, please register for the waiting list. In the event a ticket becomes available we will notify you by June 7.
"Now, What is Photography?" a panel discussion, brings together three viewpoints from the art world, journalism, and academia. The participants will address the subtle and dramatic changes in photography brought about by digital technology and social media. The panelists include Vesna Pavlović, a fine art photographer, educator, and recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award; Lucian Perkins, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist; and Colby Caldwell, whose current exhibition was created with the radical use of standard office digital scanners in place of a camera.
"Now, What is Photography?" is presented in conjunction with Colby Caldwell: over & under.
Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
About the Panelists
Colby Caldwell, once a student of history, has tested virtually every avenue of the personal uses of photography as an instrument of memory. While his early work replicated the theatrical feeling of 19th Century "drawing with light," his most recent efforts deconstruct the very elements of digital photography. Along the way he abandoned the traditional matted and framed photographic print by utilizing direct scans and large format digital printers before mounting his prints on constructed forms and coating them in wax. Caldwell’s unique presentation and the boldness of his imagery give the work the scale and presence of painting.
Caldwell is the founder of REVOLVE, a contemporary art space that functions as part gallery, part studio, part performance and gathering space. By hosting exhibitions, events, and happenings that bust hard boundaries between artist and audience, image and idea, inspiration and technique, REVOLVE's intention is focused on representing creative energies on a foundation of inclusion, accessibility and experimentation. In Spring 2022 he was the inaugural artist in residence at Selu Conservancy, Radford University. His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. Caldwell received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 1990 and currently lives and works in Asheville, NC.
Vesna Pavlović obtained her MFA degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2007. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In the 1990s, in Belgrade, Pavlović worked closely with the feminist pacifist group Women in Black. She provided artistic witness to the disintegration of her native Yugoslavia through her documentary work. She is the recipient of the 2021 Current Art Fund Grant, 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Fulbright Scholar Award in 2018, George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation grant in 2017, Contemporary Art Foundation Emergency grants in 2014 and 2011, and Art Matters Foundation grant in 2012. Pavlović has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Museum of History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. She participated in a number of group shows, including the Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, in Turkey; The MAC – Metropolitan Arts Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Württembergischen Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, Germany; KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia; Zachęta, The National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland; City Art Gallery, in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK; the Bucharest Biennale 5, in Bucharest, Romania; Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, USA; Le Quartier Center for Contemporary Art in Quimper, France; NGBK in Berlin, Germany; Photographers’ Gallery in London and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK; and FRAC Center for Contemporary Art in Dunkuerqe, France. Recent publications include Vesna Pavlović, Stagecraft (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive (Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2018).
Lucian Perkins, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, worked as a staff photographer for The Washington Post for twenty-seven years. While at the Post, Perkins covered many of the major events of the time, including Russia since 1988, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the first Palestinian uprising on the West Bank, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also chronicled local and national events throughout the United States. Colleagues in Russia were the inspiration for him to co-found InterFoto, an annual non-profit international photography conference held in Moscow for ten years until 2005. In 2009 he co-founded Facing Change: Documenting America, which is now running a very successful program in Detroit. Currently, Perkins is an independent photographer and filmmaker concentrating on multimedia projects and documentaries while continuing to pursue his love for the still image.