Symposium: Learning Through Photography

Full schedule and registration information on the Princeton University Art Museum website.

In conjunction with the exhibition Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, at the Princeton University Art Museum, the symposium Learning Through Photography will bring together scholars and practitioners to think outward from central themes of the exhibition – including creativity, institutions, and attention – toward our current moment. The gathering will be framed by two events: an opening keynote that will reflect on twentieth and twenty-first century ways of learning through and about photography, and a closing conversation with students of Emmet Gowin – thus linking Princeton’s long stewardship of the Minor White Archive with the celebrated new acquisition of the Emmet Gowin archive. Between the keynote and the closing conversations, three thematic panels will combine provocations from invited speakers with moderated discussion.

The exhibition Photography as a Way of Life explores disciplinary origins; it traces the definition of a field for fine art photography in the postwar United States. The symposium aims to throw that process into sharper relief, to explore its blind spots and limits, to think through its legacies, its effects in the present, and its untapped potentials. The symposium is organized by Monica Bravo, Princeton Department of Art & Archaeology, Kate Bussard, Princeton University Art Museum, and Brendan Fay, the guest curator of Photography as a Way of Life.