This is your brain after one year as a PhD student

This is my brain. This is my brain after finishing my first year as a PhD student. Actually, these are about 1/2 of the post-its I removed from my ~70 books before returning them to the library (and from the 10+ books I bought, both numbers are from the spring semester alone). Despite the exhaustion, I'm in a good spot: the program and professors are fantastic and my colleagues inspirational. I have learned so much. Bruce also celebrated a milestone: he finished his first year as a fulltime professor and recently graduated his first class.

One year of coursework down, one more to go...and then all that other stuff (orals, prospectus, dissertation). It's rather strange as I haven't not worked fulltime in about 11 years. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty to do: prep for teaching the history of photography in BU's second summer session (here's hoping that two more sign up!), curate an exhibition of Dan Ranalli's work for the fall/winter at the Provincetown Art Museum, go to a conference in London (here's hoping the flights come down!), and get married in the Catskills. Nevertheless, I am still recovering from the year and also not quite sure what to do with myself as I re-enter the land of the living. (A start: yesterday, I bought flowers and planted my window boxes.)

Getting my PhD is something I've always wanted to do and I always intended to go back, but I now feel something like a high schooler without steady summer employment. Some of the more interesting summer jobs I have had in the way past include amusement park ride operator and ice cream truck driver. What are some of the more noteworthy or quirky ones you've had? Any suggestions, tips, or tricks for re-entry inbetween/after school?

National Geographic's "Peeps in Places"

National Geographic put out a call for photographs of "Peeps in Places" (love the name) and the winners will be featured on their blog next week. In the meantime, check out some selections from this year so far here and last year's winners gallery here. (For some peep trivia, learn more about the making of peeps here and a peep research site here.)

I was especially charmed by their contest graphic featuring one of their finalists from last year -- a snapshot of two bunny peeps peeping through a Tower Optical coin-operated binocular viewer! The topic is near and dear as I just gave a paper on this very device.

I particularly enjoy that they call for a "sense of place":

"We want to know what it felt like to be there," says Dan Westergren, Senior Photo Editor at National Geographic Traveler. "And we want to be able to tell by looking at the photograph that the Peep had a good time."

Happy spring and trails everyone!

SPE Northeast region, news

At the national Society of Photographic Education (SPE) meeting in Philadelphia earlier this month, Bruce was elected chair of the Northeast Region! He is very excited and hopes to rally the troops!

SPE has made a tremendous difference in Bruce's life. It blows my mind to think that in 2005 he nervously came with me to Chicago. Reviews filled up, but he brought his portfolio anyways and ended up showing it to tons of people, making lots of connections, and meeting many new friends. Just 5 years later, he has his MFA and is an Assistant Professor at NEIA!

For those in the Northeast (CT, MA, ME, NH, NY, RI, VT), please join the facebook group here and watch for good things to come!

ABOVE: SPE pic of Bruce with his color checker t-shirt I bought him for his birthday along with RISD students and the amazing Henry Horenstein, all at the legendary dance party. Bruce will be teaching a section of large format/view camera at RISD again in the fall.

Harnessing positive energy, David Prifti

I want to take a moment to blog about an amazing person, David Prifti. David has been battling pancreatic cancer and tomorrow he will have intraoperative radiation. I know that I along with so many people he has touched are sending heaps of collective positive energy his way. If anyone can beat this, David can.

I showed David's liquid emulsion work at the PRC in Contemporary Vernacular in 2004/2005. As he is often wont to say, although he went to Yale, he's still a kid from Worcester. A high school photo teacher by day, David readily gives of himself and he always generously opened his studio to my Art Institute of Boston Professional Directions classes (replete with lemonade and cookies). He spoke to the students about balancing one's life and work and gave them what is perhaps the best piece of advice for an artist: do something everyday, no matter how small, for your art.

For those who don't know David, I hope you take a minute today or tomorrow to ponder a favorite teacher and add a little positive energy back into the universe. The impact that educators make on our lives is immeasurable.

Check out more of his awesome work on his website.

UPDATE - GOOD NEWS! The surgery went well. Now let's keep up the positive vibes!

ABOVE: David Prifti, Assabet River, from Trees

Paper at the BU Art History Graduate Student Symposium, "Place"

I was delighted to be selected to present at the BU Art History graduate student symposium on March 20th. The presentations and keynote look wonderful and place is a favorite topic of mine. I can't wait to hear them all! The full schedule of events is below and more information is here.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Friday, March 19, 2010, 5:30pm
Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery
855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215

Anne Whiston Spirn, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Language of Landscape
(www.annewhistonspirn.com)

GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 10:00am-3:00pm
Riley Seminar Room, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115

10:00 am COFFEE, Riley Seminar Room

10:30 am MORNING SESSION
Moderator: Lana Sloutsky, Boston University

10:40-11:40 am - PRESENTATION OF PAPERS

Elisa Foster, Brown University
Remembered Places and Lost Spaces: Retrieving the Medieval Sites of Le Puy-en-Velay

Jessica Roscio, Boston University
The New Woman at Home: Alice Austen, Gendered Identities, and Domestic Spaces

Sally H. King, Columbia University/The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Establishing the Modern Gateway: the Ornament and Architecture of Grand Central Terminal, 1913

11:40 am QUESTION & ANSWER

12:00 pm LUNCH
1:00 pm COFFEE, Riley Seminar Room

1:30 pm AFTERNOON SESSION
Moderator: Austin Porter, Boston University

1:40-2:40 pm - PRESENTATION OF PAPERS

Elizabeth Bennett Hupp, University of California, Berkeley
On China Cabinets in a Mennonite Living Room

Erica North Morawski, University of Illinois at Chicago
Savior of Stop-Gap Housing: The Role of the Quonset Hut in Post-World War II University Housing

Leslie K. Brown, Boston University
Nostalgia with a View: Meditations on the Tower Optical Coin-Operated Binocular Viewer

2:40 pm QUESTION & ANSWER

For more information please contact Carrie Anderson, Symposium Coordinator, Art History Department, Boston University at moorec@bu.edu, or visit www.bu.edu/ah/news/2009-2010/symposium.html. This event is sponsored by The Humanities Foundation at Boston University; the Art History Department, Boston University; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery.

Above Image: Henry Pelham, A Plan of Boston in New England with its Environs (detail), 1777. Map Reproduction Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

Help needed: Photogs who document places that look like other places

I am writing as I would love to have help/input. This is hopefully what the blog-o-sphere and the internets are for, right? Right!

As many know, I am in my second semester as a full-time student. Currently, I am taking a seminar on Globalization and Contemporary Art (in addition to Institutional Architecture). I am hoping to write my seminar paper in part on photographers who document places that look like other places and all of the issues surrounding the locations and this practice. This includes of course Andrea Robbins and Max Becher's project on the "Transportation of Place" and also series like Seung Woo Back's "Real World," a global place theme park in South Korea, and Reiner Riedler's "Fake Holidays." Many focus on sites of tourism in which a locale has either capitalized on a previous connection (either strong or tenuous) or created one out of the blue.

I know that that there have to be more people doing work on and about this, and perhaps it's just my tired graduate student memory that needs help jogging...can you help point me to more? I have included links above to spur your thinking and names that others have suggested so far below. If you also know of sites (such as Miniaturk in Turkey) that bring sites and monuments from disparate places together in one place, that would be welcome too.

Comment if you wish below. Many many thanks, and if used, there will be a grateful citation and endnote awarded in your honor!

OTHER NAMES SUGGESTED BY AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL FOLKS:
Beth Dow, Thomas Demand, Christopher Sims, E. Robinson Brady, An-My Lê, and variations of "Never been to"...and more.

ABOVE: Reiner Riedler, from the series "Fake Holidays"

Happy New Year!

I hope all had and are having a wonderful New Year! I think I am not alone in saying a hearty goodbye to 2009. It was a tough year. Here's to clean slates and new beginnings. Bring on 2010.

Of note, again, are Tim Garrett's fabulously funny new year's postcards. Every year for ten plus years, he has produced a postcard with a phrase that rhymes with "happy new year," an example of which is above: "Shaqy, Drew, Gere."

You can find out more info and purchase sets of postcards here. (Tim is the co-founder of www.photobooth.net and was shown in the PRC's 30th anniversary exhibition.) Jill and Tim are also super people to boot!

Above by Tim Garrett and from www.fullchordpress.com

It's a Swedish Christmas!

For this year's Christmas, I decided to get my family Swedish items in celebration of Bruce's heritage and do a little Swedish-themed blog post. Previously, I posted on Dutch traditions, including Chocolate letters, as my family is mostly Dutch.

In my research, I came across the Christmas Goat, or Julbock, who is ridden by the Swedish version of Santa Claus. Tomten is a gnome that lives under floor boards and rides a goat to deliver presents. Julbock ornaments and decorations are traditionally made out of straw, symbolizing good luck.

Since 1966, the town of Gävle in Sweden has erected a large Julbock in the center of town, only to have it burned down 38% of the time. In 1971, another group joined in the making and now Gävle has two straw goats. This newer goat has a higher survival rate of 47%. (Wikipedia even has a chart both of the goats' demise and survival.) You can see a live webcam of this year's sad burnt goat here and read about the news here. This reminds me of MIT's pranks and pranksters, although I wish this one didn't involve destruction. Thus, the tradition even has a tradition.

This strange phenomenon does not surprise me given that I just learned of the Swedes tradition of watching a 1958 Donald Duck cartoon every Christmas eve at 3pm. Read more about this fascinating cultural custom here.

As they say in Sweden, God jul!

ABOVE IMAGE: screen capture by David in Delta from webcam, Dec. 13th, 10 days before the Julbock was burned

The Last Place to Process Kodachome

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Out of the Box at the DeCordova Museum

I am delighted to announce that the show that I curated for the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Out of the Box: Photography Portfolios from the Permanent Collection, is now open!

I was honored to be chosen as the first guest curator for this new series. This exhibition is a part of a new initiative at the DeCordova: inviting guest curators to explore their permanent collection and bring to it new viewpoints. The staff was wonderful to work with and I am very proud of the show. Above are images from a special reception and gallery talk.

Out of the Box highlights the history and strengths of the DeCordova's permanent photography collection. DeCordova's holdings offer a unique opportunity to explore this topic as nearly one fifth of the photography collection's over 1,400 prints are from portfolios. Selections from 11 diverse portfolios are featured, as well as the entire PRC Portfolio.

If you are in the area, I hope you can check it out! Dates for the exhibition and the opening reception are listed below.

Out of the Box: Photography Portfolios from the
Permanent Collection
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA
October 24, 2009 - October 2010
Opening reception (in conjunction with their Biennial):
Saturday, January 23, 7 - 9pm

For more information and directions, click here.

Pics above, a mix of images taken by Roger Farrington and Bob Watts.

Godowsky Color Awards website/exhibition

Check out the new Godowsky Awards website!

This cycle, these international awards focus on emerging artists and new approaches in color photography. Jennifer Uhrhane and I have worked on this for over a year and were both jurors along with two amazing guests: Bill Ewing and Hannah Frieser. It's my last project at the PRC.

We're thrilled with the site and the show, which I have somehow fit in between school. If you are in the area, join us for the opening Thursday, November 12, 7-8:30pm or check out the exhibition, which runs through January 24th. Many of the artists will be in attendance.

MORE INFORMATION:

The Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Color Photography Awards honor the co-inventor of Kodachrome film, a man whose contributions have had a major and lasting impact on photography. Established in 1987, the international awards recognize excellence in the field of contemporary color photography and are gathered via nominations from a prestigious, international group of curators, critics, editors, and educators. Over the course of seven award cycles—with the first presented in 1988, and the most recent in 2009—the awards have bolstered the careers of some 30 individual artists representing more than 18 countries.

2009 Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Color Photography
Award recipients:

Claudia Angelmaier (Germany)
Alejandro Chaskielberg (Argentina)
Curtis Mann (IL, USA)
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick (NY, USA)

HONORABLE MENTION (online showcase only):
Seung Woo Back (South Korea and UK)

Website designed by Matt Nash

UPDATE: You can check out images of the show and opening reception, including many of the artists, by clicking here.

The Instant Art Critique

I am so overwhelmed with reading and grading right now...I simply will share a link and quote it. I present you with The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator. Click on the links to make your own. Some of my results are after the jump. Enjoy!

Salvation is here!
Feeling inarticulate? Critically gauche? Or just verbally impotent?

We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy "insights." With this device you can speak about Art with both authority and confidence. Use this marvellous tool to amaze and confound friends and colleagues. Don't miss this opportunity to menace and dumbfound professors and artists emeriti!

The instructions are simple -- type any five digit number in the field below, click 'Create,' and enjoy your ready-made Critical Response to the Art Product (or CRAP).

Now you can produce CRAP critiques as easily and fluently as anyone in your MFA program!

Some of my results:

"It should be added that the reductive quality of the purity of line seems very disturbing in light of the eloquence of these pieces."

"With regard to the issue of content, the mechanical mark-making of the gesture makes resonant the substructure of critical thinking."

"I'm troubled by how the internal dynamic of the spatial relationships threatens to penetrate the eloquence of these pieces."

Bruce's new website has been Wordle-ed

In next week's Art History discussion sections, we are going over a lot of terminology from sculpture and architecture (relief, pediment, peristyle, doric, ionic, triglyph, metope, etc.).

In a moment of true art history geekdom, I wanted to make the point that we are going to "vocabulary land" and thus searched out sites that created word clouds. I stumbled across wordle.net and proceeded to input all of the classical architecture terms from wikipedia.

Excited, I then took all of the text from Bruce's new website under the news section (be sure to check it out) and inputted them into wordle. Above is what it came up with. Bruce astutely pointed out that it looks vaguely like a map of the US. This site is a blast! You can change the orientation, font, colors, etc. I encourage you to visit wordle.net and create your own!

My new commute and first week as a PhD student

Not that I am actually walking from the PRC to the BU Art History department, but above represents my "move" if you will and a big life transition from working fulltime to going to graduate school fulltime: 0.3 miles. I am currently parking in Cambridge to save money and walking over the BU bridge with laptop and books. Luckily, I have a little office cubicle, which is proving quickly to be a life (and back) saver and I don't have to find a new grocery store. I always wanted to go back for my PhD, it just took me a while. I am loving it.

Updates will be fewer and farther between as the reading and prep work takes over... But in short, I had my first 1/2 week of classes, including a seminar on representations of Paris. I will also be taking a seminar on Material Culture. I am a teaching fellow and will be leading 3 discussion sections in support of Art History 111 (ancient to medieval) with about 20 students in each. I just finished preparing my section powerpoint, we're looking at the Venus of Willendorf, Palette of King Narmer, Standard of Ur, and the Alexander Mosaic and comparing them with some later works to get them used to looking and describing what they see in words. I had a blast putting it together.

Two years ago, Bruce was preparing for graduate school, see this post for example, and now I am. He starts teaching fulltime at the New England Institute of Art this fall and is also teaching a section of View Camera at RISD. Wish us both luck!

A Kodak Family

At one point, I asked my father to help me name how many people in our family worked at Kodak and tell me what they did. This is an incomplete list and does not include countless distant relatives -- or the families of pretty much my whole high school and many in college -- but I thought I'd share it at this point.

It's a window into a time when (for better and for worse) a town was an industry and an industry a town and folks worked 30+ years at and for only one company. The closest I've experience I have had to this is here in Boston meeting folks who worked at Polaroid. Consider this an open post to share any company, industry, or trade that has persisted in your family. I'd be curious to know!

Let's see.. Wow!!!!

Dad: all over (claim to fame: he named T-Max)
Mom: Secretary
Brother: Fork lift operator in high school
Uncle: Master mechanic
Uncle: 126 Film loader
Aunt: Secretary
Uncle: Plastic molding operator
Cousin: Personnel
Cousin: Emulsion making
Grandfather: Roll film paper coating
Great Grandfather: Tin smith
Great Uncle: Paper mill
Great Aunt: Secretary
Great Uncle: Art department
Great Uncle: Distribution
Great Uncle: ?
Great Uncle: ?
Great Aunt: ?
Great Uncle: ?

LKB & PRC in PDN

The wonderful Edgar Allen Beem interviewed a whole host of photo spaces and the results are featured in July issue of PDN.

The article, “Preparing for Launch: Non-Profit Photography Spaces are a Proving Ground for Emerging Photographers,” is chock a block full of excellent advice for getting your work out there.

I was interviewed about the PRC’s ops for and devotion to emerging photographers, especially the Annual PRC Juried Exhibition. I am excited to be included along with my photo friends and heroes. The whole Fine Arts issue is amazing.

PS - online access is for subscribers only - get thee to a newsstand for the whole issue, it’s worth it!

PhD bound and other news

My apologies first for not posting this earlier! I have been emailing to tell the news, but it's been a stressful/crazy spring, so forgive me if there is some repetition and a lot going on. I figured I’d just adapt my “news” email and post it here:

I am delighted to announce that I have been accepted into the PhD program in Art History at Boston University! So, Bruce and I will be around Boston for some time to come. My last day at the PRC will be in mid August. Classes start September 2nd. I will focus on the history of photography. It's a wonderful program - with a history of amazing scholars, professors, and curators - and I am thrilled to be a part of it.

I am honored and humbled to have served and been a part of the PRC and will have worked here for almost 25% of its existence. I am not the best with change and letting go - it will be hard, maybe in some ways easier and some ways harder as I will not be moving - but the time and place is right.

My aim is to emerge on the other side as a curator/educator and will try to stay involved in the contemporary photoworld in the meantime. Although I might take a break from reviewing portfolios and some other things, I hope to stay connected to this incredible community, regionally, nationally, and beyond.

As when it rains, it pours - on a sad note, my father found out he has esophagus cancer and had an operation. But, it's very early, thus he doesn't have to have radiation or chemo and the prognosis is good. Thus, I am even more grateful that I am close to home. In addition, I also was in an accident on my way to Bruce's thesis show (I am absolutely fine), and the insurance totaled my Saturn (it was old). Thus, I also had to look for and buy a new-to-me car amidst all of this (update: I got a 2001 Subaru outback, midnight blue). Ah life, funny isn't it?

Bruce passed his orals, finished the thesis, and graduated. He is teaching four classes this summer at the New England Institute of Art and will be there again in the fall. He also will teach view camera at RISD! My folks, Bruce, and I are looking at wedding venues near Woodstock, NY for a summer 2010 wedding. We have come to love the Catskills and it's halfway between Rochester and Boston. We are eager to begin the next phase of our life.

On another note, I am excited to select my classes and also that I never have to take the GRE again!

I hope that you are enjoying your summer (and let’s all hope that it stops raining soon).

Very best, Leslie

ABOVE: Someday, several years from now, I hope to don BU's elegant PhD regalia and be called, yes, Dr. Brown.