Fall is here!

Fall is here!

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Filter Photo Festival photo booth

Filter Photo Festival takes place in Chicago every September. There are workshops, portfolio reviews, lectures, exhibition openings, and a lot more going on throughout the 4 days. As a gift to the grads, our chair provided each student with 2 portfolio reviews. It gives us a chance to have outside eyes on our work and potentially make new contacts in our industry. This year, I had Mike Itkoff, co-founder of Daylight Books and Paul Roth of Ryerson Image Centre review my work. They both provided me with artists to research and other ideas to consider moving forward.

James Pepper Kelly, Managing Director and Julie Weber, MFA 2014

Art Walk – Whit Forrester, MFA 2016

Art Walk – Rebecca Sittler

My favorite part of this year’s festival was an unexpected visit from my undergraduate advisor, Rebecca Sittler, and the amazing lecture by Carrie Mae Weems in conjunction with Columbia’s Lectures in Photography Series.

HPAC Grads

My schedule this semester has been packed. On Tuesdays, I work at the Hyde Park Art Center with two other photography graduate students. We were given the opportunity to be teaching artists and teach photography to teens from different high schools around Hyde Park.

Photo Studio – Hyde Park Art Center

This quarter is all about the Portrait and I am co-teaching with Lena Vieira (MFA 2015). The class is going well so far. I am looking forward to our field trip to Columbia’s photography studio in a couple weeks.

Photographing People – Module 2

I am also TAing. The second module of three for Photographing People is underway. The best part of this class is taking the class outside. It is a nice change of pace.

I mentioned Candidacy in the last post. That date for the second year class is November 19th. We each present our work to faculty members and we have a discussion for about 45mins. Thankfully, we had a trial run at the end of the first year, but it is still not easy.

Seminar Critique – Scott Vahan Tavitian, MFA 2016

For graduate classes prior, they had to present to the full faculty, my class is only doing half. I am not completely sure why there was this change.  Reviews are the only times all of the faculty members are together. To give an example of the pairings, my first review was with Gregory Foster-Rice, Judy Natal, Kelli Connell, Ross Sawyers, and Bob Thall. We have to address the following questions:

  1. What are the ideas and/or issues that inform and motivate your work?
  2. How has the process of making your work evolved?
  3. Evaluate what is and what is not working visually, technically, and conceptually in your work. Please refer to specific images when discussing this topic.

The questions are not a surprise. We consistently answer and consider some form of each question in critique and meetings.

Wish me luck :)

Shows to check out:

Alec Soth at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

Carlos Javier Ortiz at David Weinberg Gallery