Associate Professor Christopher Jordan has been named one of ten finalists for the 2018 Clarence John Laughlin Award for photography. Jordan entered a portfolio of images, which included the photograph here, titled "Bad Dog." The Clarence John Laughlin Award was created to support the work of photographers who use the medium as a means of creative expression. It honors the life and work of Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985), a New Orleans photographer best known for his surrealist images of the American South. The Award grants one $5000 prize annually to a photographer whose work exhibits sustained artistic excellence and creative vision. This year’s juror is Marcela Correa, Executive Director of the Arts District of New Orleans. Jordan explains his method of image-making: "I start by creating a 20”x30” tabletop diorama from photographs, cut paper and vellum. These dioramas are then lit in the studio and re-photographed. Through the play of light on vellum, I create the atmospheric effects. Through the interplay of physical materials, light and implied narrative, this work explores the ambiguity between photographic realism and pictorialism, and the ordinary versus the uncanny." For more information about UA’s Department of Art and Art History’s degree programs, go to this page: https://art.ua.edu/academics/
Art Professor’s Work Receives Juror’s Award
Associate professor of art Chris Jordan received the juror’s award for his image, Emptying, in the upcoming exhibition Myths, Legends and Dreams at the Vermont Photoplace Gallery in Middlebury, Vt. The exhibition dates are March 7 – March 31, 2018. The call for entries for the juried exhibition sought photographic works that would bring the viewer into the artist's "world of fantasy and reflection." The exhibition was developed around the idea that "Photography has the ability to make visible scenes that never did or never could exist, thus providing artists with the ability to fabricate stories, create legends, and delve into self-reflection." The juror, Amy Holmes George, is executive director of the Texas Photographic Society and a fine art photographer based near Dallas, Texas. She has held teaching appointments at Collin College, Baylor University, University of North Texas and Stephen F. Austin State University, and exhibited widely throughout the United States and Italy, England, France and China. Her work has been featured in over 100 exhibitions and is housed in several permanent collections, including The Getty, The Kinsey Institute and the Fratelli Alinari Museum. In Chris Jordan’s landscape photography, he creates imagery of both real and imaginary places. He specializes in both analog and digital processes, finding resonance in how creativity unfolds through technology. Jordan has exhibited throughout the Northeast and his work is held in numerous private collections. View Jordan's work and the other images in the exhibition here: https://photoplacegallery.com/myths-legends-dreams/. For more information about The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History degree programs, go to our website.
Art History Professor Wins Book Award
Associate Professor of Art History Lucy Curzon's new book, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain, has been awarded the Historians of British Artist Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800. The prize committee found Curzon's book, published by Routledge in 2017, "theoretically sophisticated and convincingly argued, a timely and important volume on the anthropological research group Mass-Observation and its attitudes towards visual culture." It is the first full-length study of the art produced under the auspices of the group. The committee praised Curzon for her in-depth research in an "understudied" area of British art and culture. "The social research organization known as Mass-Observation was founded in 1937 to document everyday life. Due to the diverse nature of interests and projects undertaken by the group, they remain under-studied in an art historical context. Lucy Curzon corrects this oversight, providing an account of the movement in relation to visual culture, a timely and important theme. She brings an art historian’s interpretive skill to the sociological and visual culture project of Mass-Observation, examining the use of painting, collage, photography, and visual media within their word, providing an account of the important role of these visual elements in Mass-Observations project to understand national identity in the 1930s. In so doing, Curzon provides an important model of compatibility of art history and visual culture as related, fields of inquiry." Curzon's research focuses on issues of identity politics as they concern the production of visual culture in twentieth-century Britain. She has previously published work on LGBTQ+ portraiture, as well as articles or chapters on the Ashington Group and Humphrey Spender’s photographs of Blackpool in the 1930s. She regularly presents her work at national and international conferences. To read more about Dr. Curzon and her new book, go here. Since 1997, Historians of British Art (HBA) has awarded three prizes each year for books on British art in the following categories: pre-1800, post-1800 and multi-authored book. HBA is an affiliate society of the College Art Association and was formed to promote scholarship and other professional endeavors related to British art and architecture. For more information about The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History degree programs, go to our website.