Free Symposium that Examines 1970s Documentary Photography Is Open to Public
New Brunswick, NJ – The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers invites the campus community and general public to the interdisciplinary symposium “Reinventing Documentary Photography in the 1970s,” on March 23 and 24. The program opens on Thursday evening with a keynote address and reception. It continues all day Friday, bringing together a panel of scholars and artists to examine the standard narratives around the reemergence of the genre during that tumultuous decade. Both days of the symposium are free and open to the public, but registration is required.
“Reinventing Documentary Photography in the 1970s” explores the multiple ways that documentary work was rethought and contested during the decade, in both critical discourse and artistic practice. On Thursday, March 23, at 6 p.m., independent artist, researcher, editor, and curator Jorge Ribalta presents the keynote talk “Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism,” reflecting on the exhibition of the same title that he organized at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia in 2015. The symposium continues Friday, March 24, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a panel of international art historians, curators, and artists who rarely have had the opportunity to exchange research and ideas on this topic. The symposium aims to propel new scholarship on these artistic practices and the critical discourses they have generated. While art historians and curators from Europe have been rewriting these histories for several years, emerging and established art historians in the United States are just beginning to examine the era’s surprisingly diverse practices. Speakers represent: NYU/The Institute of Fine Arts; University of Westminster; Columbia University; University of Miami (Florida); University of Chicago; Princeton Art Museum; College of Staten Island & Graduate Center CUNY; and University of Pennsylvania. On March 23, the keynote is preceded by a reception beginning at 5 p.m. On March 24, coffee and light refreshments are provided in the morning; attendees have lunch on their own; and the symposium concludes with a reception. All programming (except lunch; a list of local eateries will be provided) takes place at the Zimmerli Art Museum on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“Reinventing Documentary Photography in the 1970s” was organized by Sarah Miller, an independent scholar specializing in the history of photography, and Drew Sawyer, a curator of photography and a journal editor, in collaboration with the Developing Room and Zimmerli Art Museum. It is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA) at Rutgers, and the Office of the Dean of Humanities at Rutgers.
The symposium is a key component of an ambitious, multi-year collaboration between the Zimmerli Art Museum and the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In early 2016, The Public Image: Social Documentary Photography from the Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum was published. The Zimmerli’s second publication available in ebook format only, it resulted from a seminar in which students studied, firsthand, works of art in the museum’s collection. The final element is the major exhibition Partisan Views and Public Opinion: Engaged Photography In and Beyond the Twentieth Century, which opens at the Zimmerli in September 2017.