FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: PRC to give three Lifetime Achievement Awards in Celebration of 35th Anniversary

Photographic Resource Center
at Boston University

832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
www.prcboston.org
617-975-0600



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 7,  2010

Contact: Glenn Ruga, 617-975-0600, gruga@prcboston.org

Photographic Resource Center Celebrates 35 Years with Gala Celebration November 9

Lifetime Achievement Awards to be given to Carl Chiarenza, Chris Enos, and Barbara Hitchcock. Acclaimed photography writer and critic Vicki Goldberg to be keynote speaker.

BOSTON – Thirty-five years ago an idea was afloat in Boston that there needed to be an organization committed to supporting and promoting photography, which at the time was just beginning to gain recognition as a fine art on the level of painting, drawing, printing making, and sculpture.

In 1975, A. D. Coleman, Jeff Weiss, and Chris Enos, with help from the photography community in Boston, got together to create the Photographic Resource Center, with Enos was appointed founding Executive Director in 1976. On the first board of directors were Donald Perrin, Carl Chiarenza, Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, Davis Pratt, and others. The PRC gained official existence in October 1976 as a non-profit organization. The exhibition program began in 1985.

Since the PRC’s founding, photography luminaries from the world over have lectured, exhibited, and given workshops at the PRC. This list includes Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arnold Newman, Ed Ruscha, John Szarkowski, Aaron Siskind, Joel Meyerowitz, Eliot Porter, Cornell Capa, Emmet Gowin, Jerome Liebling, Lee Friedlander, Wendy Ewald, Barbara Norfleet, Vicki Goldberg, Ansel Adams, Marilyn Bridges, William Wegman, Bruce Davidson, Susan Meiselas, and Mary Ellen Mark.

In celebration of this storied history, the PRC will host a gala celebration on November 9 at the Photonics Center at Boston University, Colloquium Room, 9th Floor, 8 Saint Mary’s Street, from 6–10 pm.

Lifetime Achievement Awards will be presented to Chris Enos and Carl Chiarenza, PRC founders, and to Barbara Hitchcock, former Curator of the Polaroid Collections, for her outstanding service to the photography community. Acclaimed photography critic and author Vicki Goldberg will give the keynote address. Andrea Shea, Arts Reporter for WBUR Morning Edition, will be the emcee for the evening.

This event will include a gallery displaying prints from the PRC Portfolio. The PRC is providing a rare opportunity to purchase these masterful photographs individually. We will also be exhibiting the PRC 35th Anniversary Portfolios, created especially for this occasion.

The PRC will feature an exhibition of recent work by Chris Enos and Carl Chiarenza in its gallery, 832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston from November 10, 2010 through January 9, 2011.

Tickets for the Gala are $200 and can be purchased online at www.prcboston.org/gala.htm

Biographies of Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients and Keynote Speaker:

Honoree Carl Chiarenza, (b. 1935) a native and current resident of Rochester, New York, is Artist-in-Residence and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Rochester. He has a long history with Boston and Boston University; between 1963 and 1986 he was Chairman, Director of Graduate Studies, and Professor of Art History at BU. He also received two graduate degrees from BU, followed by a PhD from Harvard in 1973. Chiarenza has lectured and taught at institutions across the United States; his photographic work has been seen in more than eighty solo exhibitions and more than 250 group exhibitions since the late 1950s. His critical biography Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (published 1982) received a 1983 Merit Award from the Photographic Historical Society. He was one of the earliest members of the Society for Photographic Education, and has developed and guided numerous organizations (including the PRC) devoted to photographic arts. Chiarenza was a founding Board member of the PRC.

Honoree Chris Enos received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. The idea for the PRC first lodged in her imagination in 1975; she enlisted the help of others to push the discussion forward through its official birth in 1976, and served as the fledgling organization’s executive director until 1980, when she turned the reins over to Stan Trecker. Enos is an experienced teacher, and from 1986 to 2004 she was a professor at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH). Her photographs and multi-media artworks are in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Since retiring from teaching in 2004 she now works and lives in Santa Fe (NM).

Featured speaker Vicki Goldberg is a photography critic and author based in New York City. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri and earned an MFA from New York University. Goldberg has authored several books and articles on the subjects of photography and art history. Over the course of her career, Goldberg has written for countless publications, including Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, American Photo, Aperture, Art in America, and ArtNews; she has written regular articles on photography for The New York Times for over 14 years. Goldberg’s books include two award-winners, her 1986 biography of Margaret Bourke-White and The Power Of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, published 1991. Aperture published Light Matters, a selection of her essays, in 2005. Goldberg has also co-written several books with other authors such as A Nation of Strangers: Essays written with Arthur Ollman and American Photography: A Century of Images written with art historian Robert Silberman. She has taught and lectured worldwide, including six years at Rhode Island School of Design, 2002 – 2008.

Honoree Barbara Hitchcock was employed by the Polaroid Corporation for nearly 40 years, the last 19, from 1990 to 2009 as their director of cultural affairs. While working for Polaroid she managed and directed strategic marketing communications and program planning, development, and execution. Among her areas of influence were the Polaroid fine art collections and the 20x24 Studio. Earlier at Polaroid she served as Group Manager, Press and Publicity Worldwide, as Manager of Worldwide Creative Programs, and as Photographic Services Coordinator. Hitchcock has a BA in English from Skidmore College, and additional degrees, certificates, and special recognition from: Simmons College Graduate School of Management; Center for Creative Leadership; and the Center for Corporate Community Relations at Boston College. Hitchcock has also edited and produced books and exhibition catalogues, among them Sanctuary: Anna Tomczak Photography (Fresco Fine Art Publications, 2007), Emerging Bodies: Nudes from the Polaroid Collections (Edition Stemmle, 2000), the Selections From the Polaroid Collection series (Verlag Photographie), Lucas Samaras: Polaroid Photographs, 1969-1983 and Sightseeing: A Space Panorama (Knopf). She has authored essays for a number of publications, most recently Private Views: Barbara Crane (Aperture, 2009), The Polaroid Book (Taschen, 2005), American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2000), Victor Raphael: space fields (William D. Cannon Art Gallery, 2004), Counterclockwise (Galleri Image, 2002), and Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography (Abrams/Friends of Photography, 1999). Hitchcock formerly worked with large format cameras creating photographs that have been exhibited and published worldwide. Hitchcock was president of the PRC Board of Directors 1995 –1998.

Polaroid a la King

From "The Sun Dog":

When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly. "It's ready," Kevin said, in the same straining-to-be-offhand-but-not-quite-making-it tone with which Neil Armstrong had reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. "Why don't all you guys stand together?"

...

If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable...and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn't what was wrong with it--that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child's swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique.

...

His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they were seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one: it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fish-eye, so that the dog's forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog's murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people's eyes.

...

The camera did not moan or whine this time; the sound of its mechanism was a scream, high and drilling, like a woman who is dying in the throes of a breech delivery. The square of paper which shoved and bulled its way out of that slitted opening smoked and fumed. Then the dark delivery-slot itself began to melt, one side drooping downward, the other wrinkling upward, all of it beginning to yawn like a toothless mouth. A bubble was forming upon the shiny surface of the last picture, which still hung in the widening mouth of the channel from which the Polaroid Sun gave birth to its photographs.

From King's prefatory note on the story in the collection Four Past Midnight:

About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. ... In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids, before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them.

--Stephen King. Four Past Midnight. New York: Viking, 1990.

Polaroid terror

No, I'm not talking about the recent state of the instant photography company, despite the financial and legal perils of its most recent owner, Tom Petters, CEO of Minnetonka, MN-based Petters Group Worldwide ("Petters Arrest Won't Change Polaroid Plans"). I'm talking about the examples I've run across of Polaroid film and cameras being used as plot devices within horror stories.

• The title character in Stephen King's short story "The Sun Dog" (from the collection Four Past Midnight) is a rabid canine that is provoked and comes to life within, and ultimately escapes from, the pictures made by a Polaroid Sun 660 camera with a mind's eye of its own, given to a 15-year-old boy as a present then co-opted by an unscrupulous New England antiquities (junk) dealer and loan shark, whose comeuppance is the story's denouement

• Episode 4 of the first season of the Showtime series Dexter, in which the Ice Truck killer taunts Dexter, first with Polaroids made to echo, in gruesomely truncated fashion, pictures from Dexter's family album, and then with a picture boldly snapped of Dexter in the company of the man kidnapped by the ITK to serve as the source for the severed limbs in the first pictures (Dexter's burning of that last image gives a good, if massively subdued, visual to illustrate the Sun Dog's escape from its two-dimensional world. Have anyone ever burned a Polaroid? Do they always bubble like that?)

• The "Unruhe" episode of The X-Files (season 4, #4), which posits a killer whose use of the instant camera creates pictures of people tormented by "howlers," menacing spirits visible to the killer and his camera but otherwise unseen, whose presence provoke the killer to take action to "ease the pain" -- the disquiet, or unrest, of the episode title translated from German -- of individuals, including Agent Scully, as in the illustration at the top ("Unruhe" was selected as one of the most "nightmare-inducing episodes ever" of this Fox series--see number 6 on this scroll.)
  

There is something eerie about this material, isn't there? I've got to haul out some of King's verbiage; although the climactic scene is over the top, it doesn't lack for vividness, and he does a good job of articulating the uncanny quality of the self-developing universe within those high tech envelopes. Let me know of other examples of Polaroid terror.