Please join us as four Writers in Residence in the Research Study Rooms
present free public lunch-time lectures on

International Photography

Thursday, February 3, 1:15 pm - Judith Mara Gutman - The Inseparable Worlds of Alfred Stieglitz and Contemporary Indian Photographers and the Aero-dynamic They Each Set Loose
Outlandish? Watch Innovation take off in an expansive, swelling culture. That's when Stieglltz made his experimental Equivalents, just as today's photographers in India are pushing the boundaries of photography as India's Information technology wags the tail of world IT.
A Writer in Residence in the Library’s Allen Room, Judith Mara Gutman is a New York-based author of books on popular and academic topics, and a specialist in the field of social history of photography.

Thursday, February 10, 1:15 pm - Andres Zervigon - Cutting-Edge Insufficiency: The Photography of Germany’s Weimar Period
Germany's Weimar years are widely considered to have been marked by a flourish of media optimism, particularly in regard to photography. But did makers and consumers of photographic images genuinely feel that the medium accurately represented their moment's multifaceted complexity? This talk will suggest that the answer was no, and that it was just such an optical insufficiency that gave rise to much of the experimentation typifying Weimar’s great moment of photography.
A Writer in Residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study, Andres Zervigon is Assistant Professor of Photography at Rutgers University, and specializes in the history of photography, concentrating on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art.

Thursday, February 17, 1:15 pm - John Casey – “Bauhausbücher” and Architecture: Photographic Blueprints for Early Modernism’s Architectural Theory
Architectural photobooks often convey their meaning by photographs of buildings and the urban environment accompanied by little or no text. During Germany’s Weimar period, avant-garde photobooks featuring early modern architecture generated a visual template for the growing architectural elite to emulate in their building practices. This talk focuses on the role of photography in several books produced by the Bauhaus concerned with architecture, such as Walter Gropius’s canonical Internationale Architektur.
A Writer in Residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study, John Casey is a PhD candidate in the Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Thursday, February 24, 1:15 pm - Mittra Abbaspour - Reflections in the Mirror of the Soul: Writing the History of Photography in the Middle East
The recent emergence of archives that assemble expansive collections of photographs taken by local practitioners in the Middle East demonstrates that this modern medium has been integral to representations of power, political protest, popular culture, and commercial enterprise there, as elsewhere. Moreover, such photograph archives call on the history of photography in the region to represent the relationship between the Middle East and modernity.
A Writer in Residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study, Mitra Abbaspour is an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY