Society for Photographic Education

Friday, Nov. 12

Friday 2:00 to 4:00 PM concurrent

• Workshop: Cultivating Creativity While Teaching Technology

Pre-registration required, limited to 30 participants

San Diego City College Photography Department (room V-403A CTC Bldg), 16^th and Broadway.

Cultivating Creativity While Teaching Technology will start by taking a look at three college level beginning photography courses and discuss how the use of digital imaging tools have been integrated into the curriculum. Challenges and ongoing ideas related to how to keep creative practice and encouragement in the classroom and curricula will be explored and discussed with all attendees. Then, attendees will break into small groups for discussion, a syllabi “swap” of Photo 1 or related courses and sharing of experiences related to the workshop theme.

Attendees should bring 30 copies of their course syllabi/schedule as well as one assignment idea to share with the entire group of pre-registrants.

Friday 3:00 to 4:00 PM concurrent

• MOPA Walk Through with Dave Eichinger and Amber Lucero-Criswell

SPE members only, pre-registration required (limited to 20 members)

Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park (5 minute drive from SDCC)

1649 El Prado

San Diego, CA 92101

619-238-7559

http://www.mopa.org

San Diego City College photography professor Dave Eichinger and Amber Lucero-Criswell, Director of Education and Public Programs at MoPA, will lead a tour of the current MoPA show entitled New Realities: Jerry Uelsmann + Maggie Taylor.

Friday 4:00 to 6:00 PM

• Gallery Reception: San Diego City College Photography Department Faculty Exhibition.

San Diego City College Photography Gallery, 5th Floor CTC Building, 16^th and Broadway, 5 minute drive from MoPA. Entrance to parking garage on 17^th.

Join us to celebrate the inaugural show of SDCC’s brand new Photography Gallery. SDCC’s photography department hosts this reception for attendees of the SPE conference and the San Diego photography community.

Friday 6:00 to 7:00 PM

• Dinner break on own

Friday 7:00 PM

• Honored Educator Lecture: John Divola

Museum of Photographic Arts Auditorium

1649 El Prado

San Diego, CA 92101

619-238-7559

http://www.mopa.org

Prominent Southern California photographer John Divola’s lecture entitled The Landscape and Things in the Way will provide a narrative review of his work as a photographer from 1970 to the present.

John Divola works primarily with photography and digital imaging. While he has approached a broad range of subjects he is currently moving through the landscape looking for the oscillating edge between the abstract and the specific.

Divola’s lecture is included with SPE West conference registration but you must click on the evening lecture tab when you register to reserve a seat for yourself.

Saturday, Nov. 13

• San Diego City College Photography Department 4^th and 5^th floors CTC Building, 16^th and Broadway.

8:30 AM

• Conference Registration and Speaker Check-in • 1st Floor Foyer

9:00 AM- 5:00 PM

• Education Fair • 4th Floor Foyer

9:30 AM to 5:00 PM

• Vendor Fair • Room V-413

10 AM to 12:30 PM

• Morning Sessions: 2 Tracks concurrent

TRACK A (room V-410, CTC Building)

10-10:55am

Kim Stringfellow will present her work and research dealing with marginalized and overlooked landscapes within the western United States where the built environment and wilderness areas often converge. These hybrid documentary projects include Jackrabbit Homestead (2009), a downloadable car audio tour and book project exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California’s Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park; Invisible-5 (2006), a self-guided car audio tour investigating the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Greetings from the Salton Sea (2005), a book and installation documenting the cultural and environmental history of the Salton Sea. Stringfellow will also discuss how her creative practice relates to her teaching at San Diego State University. She will discuss an interdisciplinary honors seminar course titled, “Art, Environment, and Place” that she is currently teaching this fall semester. http://kimstringfellow.wordpress.com/

11am-12:30pm

Panel: Silver Practice in the Digital Age: Doug Dertinger, Noah Wilson, and Eric Joseph

The introduction of digital processes over the last quarter century has fundamentally altered photographic pedagogy. Twentieth century processes in silver gelatin, with their requisite equipment, specialized labs and chemicals, have taken a backseat to the digital cameras, scanners, computers, and the variety of computer driven output devices made available these last decades. Photographic education as we know it has now come into a period of revision, and opinions are varied as to what truly makes for relevant curriculum, responsible spending, and proper management of the photographic laboratories. At the heart of the matter lies the question of the real relevance of silver materials. Are silver processes still necessary to teach contemporary photographic practice, or do they occupy, like so-called “alternative processes,” a niche in the curriculum of photographic education? This panel discussion will focus on the relevance of silver and analogue processes in contemporary practice and pedagogy.

TRACK B (room V-403A, CTC Building)

10-10:55am

Rebecca Sittler Schrock

“A Spectacle and Nothing Strange” is a phrase borrowed from Gertrude Stein’s experimental writings and the title of my ongoing body of work in the still life genre. I construct visual narratives for the camera using everyday objects and natural light moving through domestic spaces.  I see the photograph as a stage where the objects, viewer and photographer perform and as a theoretical arena where directorial and observational approaches can be conflated. I work intuitively in order to cultivate shifting metaphors and associations –constructing images through a process similar to automatic writing. I am often driven by visual and conceptual polarities: insignificance and monumentality, surface and depth, the timeless and the timely. The most successful images confuse these opposites or navigate a space between them in order to encourage shifting interpretations while referencing still life traditions in both painting and photography.

Tricia Lawless Murray

Pictured here are some men who have allowed me to enter their homes and photograph them and their spaces. Sometimes I spent a few hours with them and other times I stayed the night. None of these men were strangers to me but the domestic spaces in which we met to converse and take photographs were new sites for us. I wandered in and around their homes recording poignant details; when I focused on them, moments of intimacy came and went in rhythmic patterns as I observed from the distance my camera provided. I learned of some of their insecurities about their looks or their bodies as I photographed them in states from dress to undress. The resulting images of these men in their domestic realms reveal the intrigue and difficulty of being observed and observing within a space that is marked as private.

11am-12:30pm

Thomas Michael Alleman began photographing his book-length project, “Sunshine & Noir” in September 2001. The project is comprised of a series of black-and-white, medium format urban landscapes made in Los Angeles with a plastic camera, the $25 Holga. Six months later, he began shooting a companion volume in New York City, titled “The Gilded Giant.” The Holga’s many laughable failures are well known: focus, exposure, and parallax are effectively un-controllable, and the plastic lens is always aberrant, cloudy, and vignetted. Much to Tom’s surprise, however, the Holga’s bizarre optics gave him access to a realm of richly textured impression and illusion that he could not achieve in his earlier attempts at the lyrical landscape. Tom will give a Powerpoint tour of this rather dense body of work, describing his efforts to interrogate, develop, and manage this diverse series—as well as how he has survived the journey with his passion and curiosity intact. Finally, he will discuss his use of the plastic camera, which has become a smashingly popular tool for young photographers.

Thomas McGovern

Vital Signs is an ongoing photography project on the hand painted signs and murals in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. They represent the last vestiges of a rapidly changing time and place, where cheaply made vinyl signs are quickly covering the landscape and where the hand made is seen as nostalgic and quaint. The promise of the digital age has brought many wonderful advancements in communication and commerce but has also homogenized what was once unique. Most of these signs advertise local businesses and represent the provincial concerns and tastes of the community they serve. This project is about preserving these memories and the work of the countless Latino and Anglo artists who knew that one made the most of having only a brush and some paint.

Douglas McCulloh won the right to name a street in southern California. The chance win at a charity event launched him into an obsessive relationship with a 134-home subdivision that proved to be a vivid microcosm of the new economy, a site where issues of race and gender, immigration and exploitation, hopes and dreams animate a classic California landscape. McCulloh haunted the place he named “Dream Street” for years, vividly chronicling the lives of builders, workers, and prospective homebuyers with camera and tape recorder. But Dream Street holds an additional quirk of fate. By pure chance, the photographer’s multi-year presence at “Dream Street” also cut a clean slice through the heart of the U.S. housing boom and bust. “Dream Street” is a physical 40-acres, but becomes a metaphoric location, a site where memorable characters in the new American west reach for their dreams and deal with hard realities.

10:30 to 12:30 concurrent

• Portfolio Review

Pre-registration required.

Conference room, V-401

12:30 to 1:30 concurrent

• Box Lunch: Included with conference registration

Room V-413 & terrace

12:45 to 2:30 concurrent

• Graduate Critique

Pre-registration required.

Print Finishing Room V-412

1:30 to 5:00 PM

• Afternoon Sessions: 2 tracks concurrent:

TRACK A (room V-410, CTC Building)

1:30-2:55pm

Panel: Documentary Photography: Rethinking the Forms and Concepts

Ken Light, Paul Turounet, Fred Lonidier, and Scott Hopkins

Documentary photography implies a practice in which the photographer examines a socially conscious concern of an era within an extended form. From Jacob Riis to Sebastião Salgado and now with web sites such as socialdocumentary.net, the socially engaged nature of documentary photography has continued into the 21st century. The purpose of the panel discussion will be to address and reassess the role and possibilities of “documentary photography” in contemporary art practice. Using the panelist’s work on the US. – Mexico border and immigration along with other examples of traditional and conceptual documentary, the panel will examine and discuss the concepts and forms of contemporary documentary photographic practice. In considering their divergent perspectives and practice, the panelists will offer an opportunity for the audience to reconsider the nature and forms of documentary photographic practice in the 21st century.

3-3:55pm

Panel: Site Unsighted – The Urban Landscape as Invisible Presence

Victoria Martin, Yoko Kanayama, and Sparky Campanella

The three photographers in this presentation relate to site within the urban landscape. Victoria Martin has documented a specific site, that is, each and every tree on a five-mile median strip of a four-lane urban thoroughfare. The taken-for-granted trees recover a “presence” by means of cyanotype prints referencing both historic and ecological concerns. Yoko Kanayama expands “site” into different neighborhoods in Los Angeles and has documented overgrown Ficus trees on her daily route. Yoko discovered, ironically, the best way to draw attention to these trees was to make them absent, by erasing their presence from the photographs by using silk-screened Plexiglas as a mask. Sparky Campanella does not engage a site-specific location. Instead, by documenting the urban horizon as “site,” he creates beautiful minimalist abstractions wherein the generalized horizon yields an unexpected connection to the natural world. The rigidity of the urban infrastructure below the horizon and the random nature above give presence to a new relationship.

4-5:00pm

Panel: Wind and Power: The View from Kansas

Lisa Cartwright and Stephen Rubin

This presentation is an interdisciplinary and collaborative undertaking in American Ethnographic Visual Studies (Cartwright) and Photojournalism (Rubin) that addresses the history of wind power in its technological and cultural valences of meaning in the wind-rich state of Kansas, the geographic center point of the country and the paradigmatic point of convergence of American political viewpoints. Joint fieldwork conducted in Kansas over the summers of 2009 and 2010 documents the transformation of Kansas from grain belt to wind corridor, a change that has been fraught with controversy about land rights and usage and the control of what one can see and feel not only on one’s own land but on the land of one’s neighbors. Interviews, research, and photographs have been collected from multiple sites throughout the state where wind farm development has taken place, is planned, or has been resisted. Taking the state of Kansas and its rural communities as its geographic focal point, this project is an interdisciplinary study of the transformation of place and the future of energy and power in United States agricultural communities that have seen drops in numbers of farms (with corporate consolidation) and population.

TRACK B (room V-403A, CTC Building)

1:30-2:55pm

Stephen Chalmers

Many of the most notorious serial murderers are either from the west coast or were active there, as the landscape of the Western US allows a killer to move easily between urban and rural areas and has many wilderness areas where bodies can be disposed of in order to make them difficult to find. The images of these sites in Unmarked offer a spectral, haunted kind of evidence of the sites’ historical uses, and they rely explicitly on a spiritual experience of the place to mark the destruction of a life and commemorate the victim and the site’s use. In these images, there are no direct traces of the dead who were abandoned at these sites. These images address the nature of experience, the human capacity to commit evil, and society’s fascination with death as a spectacle by delivering deliberate visual dead ends that lure the viewer’s gaze without delivering knowledge, information, or meaning.

Kirstyn Russell

I am looking at the connections between site and queerness. I am interested in the projected narrative that occurs when viewing these sites. Is this a gay bar or is it a steak house (Butches: Milwaukee, WI)? Originally when I stopped to photograph, I was drawn to the potential violence and loneliness of each site. When I started to look for queer spaces, mostly gay bars on the edges of town, I started noticing a humorous misunderstanding I was having with my subject. I wasn’t always able to find the bar but with my camera I was able to change my perception of these spaces. In Flint Michigan, “Van Dyke Photography” became “Dyke Photography.”

Jessica Ingram

Wandering around downtown Montgomery, I picked up a walking tour trail and found myself facing an ornate fountain on a brick pavilion. A Historical Marker said that I was standing on the former Court Square Slave Market, where slave traders sold men, women, and children to the highest bidder. It presented cold facts, detailing dollar values for slaves at the time and how none were given last names. The fountain was erected when this site was not considered for its history, the sign placed as a gesture of reconsideration.  The language printed on the sign was void of sentiment – in no way testifying to the experience and meaning. I watched people pass by and wondered if they knew of the history beneath their feet. Curious about what I might find at other historical sites (marked or unmarked) throughout the American South, I began my search and documented sites where Civil Rights era atrocities, Klan activities, and slave trade occurred.

3-3:55pm

Lesley Krane

Analog photography and motherhood have taught me how to wait, and the square format photographs in this series attempt to explore this simple yet resonant verb. Waiting implies a state of being that exists in between seemingly more meaningful actions. It implies a measure of passivity, a dearth of physical effort. However, the lack of exertion while waiting does not preclude the possibility of sophisticated thought, and this internal experience informs the photographs in the series Wait. Composed of momentary glimpses at the people, walls, and windows that populate streets, sidewalks, and freeway underpasses, the photographs reify mostly unexceptional and overlooked visual fields. The detachment and anonymity of the people in the photographs make the images more evocative than descriptive. Their insistent geometry acknowledges the aching repetition of the daily commute.

Noah Wilson

When I’m photographing the landscape, I’m often thinking about how what I’m looking for is invisible. I’m hoping to describe something beneath the skin of the land, and beneath human skin. The aim of my work is to follow the intimate connection between human beings and the land, and to collect imagery and stories that reveal the deeper relationship between humans and the natural world. I’m also interested in exploring various limitations and possibilities involved in studying this subject through a lens, and I try to address differences between the concepts of land and landscape.

4-5:00pm

O. Gustavo Plascencia

Hogar, dulce hogar. Where are you? Images from the Diaspora is a collection of collages that explore the ideas of home, place and belonging. Home, with a capital H, does not exist for me anymore. The house where I grew up is gone; the town where I grew up is no longer where my parents live. The distance that the Diaspora has created and the disconnection to my own past and memories gives me the ability to adapt to new environments and observe and adopt local idiosyncrasies and customs. This collection is a documentation of my broken memories and how after all it is not about a specific place, but how one relates to the place. Each image is a possible answer to the question that the title of the series asks – Hogar, dulce hogar, Where are you? The Spanglish used on the titles reinforces the idea of disconnection and desperate need to belong.

Ann Mansolino

Thresholds is an ongoing series of photographs in which I investigate issues of memory, personal and family history, and identity through interactions with the natural and built environments. The images are constructed portraits and self-portraits that function as visual metaphors that explore the relationship between the internal self and external ideas of past, present, identity, and place. The images give visual form to lived internal experience: they do not depict what a particular experience looked like, but rather what it felt like, or could have felt like, in moments of introspection, aspiration, recollection, and dislocation. Through the inclusion of weathered spaces, timeless natural expanses, and old family photographs, current identity is seen as inextricably bound up with the past – not only one’s own past, but also that of one’s predecessors and place in the world.

Saturday 5:00 to 7:00 PM

• Dinner break on own

MoPA gallery open to conference attendees from 5 to 7 pm before lecture.

Saturday 7:00 to 9:00 PM

• Keynote Speaker: Lucy Lippard, critic, activist and author

Museum of Photographic Arts Auditorium

1649 El Prado

San Diego, CA 92101

619-238-7559

http://www.mopa.org

The author of twenty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, Lucy Lippard will discuss the role of photography in relation to history, activism, tourism, cultural geography and virtual sites.

Lippard’s lecture is included with SPE West conference registration but you must click on the evening lecture tab when you register to reserve a seat for yourself.

Saturday 8:30 PM – 10:00 PM

• Informal Portfolio Review – Park Manor Suites Hotel – Balboa Room

Bring your portfolio to share with other SPE conference-goers in an informal portfolio review setting.

Park Manor Suites – 525 Spruce St.  San Diego, CA  92103

LIST OF PANELISTS’/PRESENTERS’ BIOGRAPHIES (in alphabetical order)

Thomas Michael Alleman was born and raised in Detroit. He graduated from MSU with a degree in English Literature. During a fifteen-year newspaper career, Tom was a frequent winner of distinctions from the National Press Photographer’s Association. He was California Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1995 and L.A. Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1996. As a magazine freelancer, Tom has been published regularly in Time, People, Business Week, Barron’s, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Travel. He exhibited Social Studies, a series of street photographs, widely in Southern California and is currently finishing Sunshine & Noir, a book of urban landscapes made in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Sparky Campanella is a Los Angeles based self-taught photographer who switched careers in 2001 from software marketing to fine-art photography. His figurative works are typically conceptual and abstract, with a minimalist aesthetic. Sparky has had solo exhibitions at David Weinberg Gallery in Chicago and the Koelsch Gallery in Houston. He is currently represented by the Weston Gallery in Carmel. He holds a BA from Duke University and an MBA from Stanford University. He has been awarded residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. www.campanella.com

Lisa Cartwright is a visual culture scholar who has been appointed Professor of Communication and a is faculty member in Science Studies and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California San Diego. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minnesota 1995), Practice of Looking: An Introduction to Culture (Oxford 2001, 2008) and Moral Spectatorship (Duke 2008).

Stephen Chalmers has worked as a Lead Treatment Counselor to Severely Emotionally Disturbed children, worked as an Emergency Medical Technician, and taught gang children photography – all informing his projects which deal with issues of loss. He has also been a contributor to five books, and has been in group and solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as in Australia, Ireland, British Columbia, England, South Africa, and China. He was the NW Regional Chair of SPE for two terms, was professor of Photography and Digital Media in the state of Washington for eight years and is currently a professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at YSU in Ohio. His work is in several collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Light Work, Polaroid, and the Getty Research Institute. Stephen Chalmers’ website is www.askew-view.com

Doug Dertinger is an assistant professor at CSU Sacramento, where he teaches a variety of classes hybridizing chemical and digital processes. His own work deals with issues of land use and landscape.

Erika Gentry is a Multimedia Artist and Educator. An early advocate of the digital domain, she has been teaching and presenting electronic arts at the institutional, organizational and individual levels nationwide since 1996 and has been a consultant to many of the industry’s leading professional photographers as they convert from film to a digital work-flow. She is currently an Associate Professor at City College of San Francisco. She exhibits nationally and serves on the National Board of Directors for The Society for Photographic Education and the advisory board of Lensculture Magazine and is former Vice President to the Board of Directors for Fotovision.org. www.erikagentry.com

Scott Hopkins is an Associate Professor at CSU East Bay and a documentary photographer
 whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. He has documented the Peace
 Walls in Northern Ireland, the Israel-Palestine separation fence, and is currently working on a 
project documenting the U.S. – Mexico border. http://www.scottism.com

Jessica Ingram is an artist whose practice spans multi-media non-fiction narrative, public art commissions, and community-based arts programming. Jessica was a featured artist in the 2010 New York Photo Festival, the 2009 PhotoNola Prize winner, and a nominee for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography and the Aperture Book Award. Along the Way, a video she completed with the Cause Collective was an Official Selection at Sundance Film Festival.  She has received several public art commissions in the Bay Area, and her work has been published and exhibited internationally. She is Assistant Professor in Undergraduate Photography and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Eric Joseph is Senior Vice President of Merchandising at Freestyle Photographic Supplies. Freestyle is the largest and most diversely stocked retailer of chemically based photographic materials in the world and a champion of silver-based materials. Eric Has been employed at Freestyle for twenty-five years. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Art with a concentration in Photography from California State University Northridge. As a member of the executive management for Freestyle Photographic Supplies, Eric has had the privilege to witness the photographic industry’s dramatic changes on both professional and personal levels. Freestyle’s decision to focus unwaveringly on analog photography has become a company mission: to promote and preserve the heritage of analog photographic materials and processes for future generations.

Yoko Kanayama was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s in order to go to Otis College of Art and Design to study painting, but ended up getting a BFA in Photography. She received an MFA at California Institute of the Arts and works as a photo archivist; some of her photographic works are based on visual archiving.

Lesley Krane grew up in Los Angeles, earned an A.A. degree from Santa Monica College (1987), a B.A. in Art from UCLA (1991), and an M.F.A. in Studio Art with a minor in Photography History from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1995. She began teaching in the Art Department at California State University Northridge in 1999 and has been a member of the full-time faculty at CSUN since 2002. Committed to the practice of “slow photography,” Lesley teaches her students to have a reverence and sensitivity for the medium. She is a published artist and has exhibited her work at local and national venues.

Ken Light has worked as a freelance documentary photographer, focusing on social issues facing America for over 40 years. His work has been published in seven books, including Delta Time, To The Promised Land, With These Hands, Texas Death Row and most recently Coal Hollow. He is also the author of the text Witness in Our Time: Lives of Working Documentary Photographers, now in its second edition. His new book Valley of Shadows and Dreams will be published in 2012. His work has been in numerous photo essays in newspapers, magazines and a variety of media (electronic & film), and exhibited worldwide including a one person show at the International Center for Photography (NYC), S.E. Museum of Photography, Visual Studies Workshop, Smith College Art Museum, Visa pour L’image Perpignan (France) and the San Jose Museum of Art. He is an adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and director of its Center for Photography, and a co-founder of Fotovision and the International Fund for Documentary photography. www.kenlight.com

Fred Lonidier is a Professor at the University of San Diego and his work deals with the 
sociological possibilities of photography applied to social change. He has exhibited nationally and 
internationally, including the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and inSite_05 San Diego/
Tijuana. His work has recently turned toward cross-border labor struggles and solidarity
 between U.S. and Mexican workers.

Ann Mansolino currently teaches full time in the photography program at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of California, Riverside, and an MFA from Ohio State University. In recent years, she has made art, written about art, taught photography in Ohio and Michigan, worked in Ireland, taught English in Russia, and taught writing and photography in Singapore, traveled extensively, and, of course, made more art. http://www.annmansolino.com

Victoria Martin is an arts educator and currently teaches photography full time at Pasadena City College. She has taught photography, art history and humanities at local community colleges and has been an arts writer for Artweek magazine, for which she was also the Southern California editor for several years. Her current photographic work is about the environment. vmmartin@pasadena.edu

Douglas McCulloh is an honors graduate of UC Santa Barbara and holds an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. McCulloh’s work has been shown at international venues in over 140 exhibitions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée de l’Elysee, Lausanne; Musée Nicéphore Niépce, France; La Triennale di Milano, Italy; and Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City. McCulloh is curator of 14 exhibitions of photography, the latest focusing on international blind photographers. McCulloh was one of six artists who transformed an F-18 jet hanger into the world’s largest camera to make the world’s largest photograph. Dream Street is his fourth book. www.douglasmcculloh.com

Thomas McGovern has exhibited his photographs in over 20 solo and more than 30 group exhibitions. He worked as an editorial photographer in New York for ten years and was the photo editor of the Village Voice from 1992 – 1994. He is the author of Bearing Witness (to AIDS) (1999), Amazing Grace (2010), and Hard Boys + Bad Girls (2010). His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum of Art, and The Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. He is a Professor of Artt at California State University, San Bernardino. www.thomasmcgovern.net

Tricia Lawless Murray was born and raised along the coast in Southern California. She completed her BA in Art History at UC Berkeley and MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. www.tricialawlessmurray.com

O. Gustavo Plascencia was raised in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila and attended the Escuela de Artes Plasticas before immigrating to the USA. He received his MFA at the University of Colorado in Boulder and his BFA from the University of Texas at Arlington. Plascencia’s work has been shown at both national and international venues, including Museo de Las Americas, Instituto de Artes de Medellin, The International Center of Bethlehem, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, the Academia de Bellas Artes San Carlos, and the Universidad Eafit. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Lycoming College. www.ogplascencia.com

Steven Rubin, Assistant Professor of Photography at Penn State University, worked for many years as a documentary photographer, traveling on assignment in Iraq, Rwanda, Kosovo, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile and Cuba, and throughout the United States. His photographs have been published in magazines, including The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, GEO, and The London Independent Magazine, and in numerous books including Schattenlicht – The Best of Black and White Photography (GEO) and The Century (Phaidon). His work has been exhibited in venues throughout the United States and featured at the International Festival Visa pour L’Image, in Perpignan, France. He is the recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship. He was a Fellow with the Open Society Institute, which supported his photographic investigation of the U.S. government’s detention of immigrants, and funded his development of Healing Images, a program providing digital cameras, instruction and therapy to survivors of torture.

Kirstyn Russell is a photographer whose work has been shown internationally. Russell received her BFA from New York University and her MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2007 she received the Cadre Grant to produce 10 images from the series Where We Are Not Known into postcards and mailed them to 75 recipients. The work was reproduced in Capricious Magazine and shown at SFCamerawork. Kirstyn is an Associate Professor of Photography at San Joaquin Delta College. www.kirstynrussell.com

Rebecca Sittler Schrock received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 2003 and a BA in Art and English from University of Nebraska – Lincoln. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach.

Rebecca has received state and university sponsored research grants and exhibited her work internationally. Recent venues include the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, the Ulsan International Photography Festival in South Korea, the Photographic Center Northwest (WA), Daniel Cooney Gallery (NYC), and the Photographic Resource Center in Boston (MA).  More of her work can be seen at www.rebeccaschrock.com.

Kim Stringfellow is an artist/educator residing in Joshua Tree, California. Her work and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, and locative media. She teaches in the Multimedia area as an Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. www.kimstringfellow.com

John Tonai leads the Photographic Imaging program in the School of Art and Design at the University of Northern Colorado. He has most recently taught at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California and the University of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. John received his M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis his M.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Northern Colorado, and his B.A. from the University of Sioux Falls. His World War II Relocation Camp exhibitions have been presented at numerous venues as have his photographic, woodworking and bookbinding projects.

Paul Turounet received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1995 and has been
 photographing in Mexico along the U.S. – Mexico border for the past fifteen years with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the Trans-Border Institute. He is an
 Associate Professor of Art and Photography at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California. 
http://paulturounet.com

Noah Wilson holds an MFA from San Jose State University and a BA in art history from Humboldt State University. He has had solo shows at the Haines Gallery and Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco. He has also shown with Kala Art Institute, the Headlands Center for the Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, The African American Museum of Oakland, and the Triton Museum. His prints have been collected by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Auchenback Foundation. Wilson teaches photography at Modesto Junior College. He currently lives and works in Oakland, California.