The Photographic Universe: A Conference

The Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, The Aperture Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and The Shpilman Institute for Photography jointly present The Photographic Universe: A Conference. This two-day symposium brings together a range of leading photographers, scientists, theoreticians, historians, and philosophers from Parsons as well as other institutions, to reflect and discuss photography at a pivotal moment in its history.

The field of photography is constantly changing. What constitutes a ‘photographer’ or a ‘photograph’ has always been redefined by technological innovations, never more so than during the last two decades of the emerging digital revolution and the Internet. Quite possibly, photography is now at a similar place to where it was during its invention – a time when its cultural significance quickly grew due to fast and innovative technological development. The Photographic Universe: A Conference reflects on this current moment, with the pervasive digitalization of the medium and its speedy permeation into contemporary life. What is the importance of photography as a medium and a discipline? Prominent thinkers and practitioners discuss their roles in the expanding photographic field, evaluate its increasingly blurry relationship between art and life, and speculate on how photographic images will continue to change the way we see our world.

The conference features one-on-one conversations between individuals from disparate professional and research backgrounds. Each speaker contributes a ten-minute presentation on the subject of photography, followed by a twenty minute dialogue between the presenters.

For more information, visit photographicuniverse.parsons.edu

Speaker bios:

Penelope Umbrico is a visual artist. She attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, and received her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries including: the International Center of Photography, NY; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; and P/M Gallery, Toronto. Her work has been in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; Art in General, NY; Gallery 44, Toronto; Dazibao, Montreal; Ansel Adams Center for Photography, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA. Umbrico’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Project Grant, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, and a Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship. She is currently core faculty at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Photography and Related Media program in NYC. Previously she served as the Chair of MFA Photography at Bard College.

Anne Collins Goodyear is associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Her publications include NASA and the Political Economy of Art, 1962-1974, for The Political Economy of Art: Creating the Modern Nation of Culture, edited by Julie Codell (Newark: University of Delaware Press); Technophilia, Vietnam, and the Rise and Fall of ‘Art and Technology’ in the United States, 1965-1971; and György Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology, Science in Context 17, no. 4 (December 2004): 611-35.