The University of South Carolina's Department of Art will host renowned photographer Robert Hirsch for a lecture on his series World in a Jar: War and Trauma. The Lecture will be held at 5pm on April 16, 2009 in the McMaster College of Art, Room # 214. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Robert Hirsch is an acclaimed photographer and writer. His current series World in a Jar: War and Trauma has been exhibited at such places as Parsons School of Design, South East Center of Contemporary Art and Light Work in Syracuse, New York. In addition to contributing to such publications as Afterimage, exposure, and The Photo Review, Hirsch has published several important books on photography that include: Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography and Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age.

The host of this event is the f65 Photography Club at the University of South Carolina. The main goal of f65 is to provide photography students with networking opportunities and resources related to photography, such as: workshops, activities and guest speakers that might otherwise be unavailable to students and the public.

This event was made possible by the Michael M. Bryant Memorial Fund. For further information, contact the f65 club President, Sarah Cox, at 864-630-4789.

+ Click here to read a transcript of the talk on-line + or + Download an Adobe PDF of the talk +

F295: 21st Century Photography Exhibition at Camera Club of New York!

F295 is pleased to announce that the Camera Club of New York will be hosting an exhibition entitled F295: 21st Century Photography from January 16 - 20, 2009.

This show coincides with the F295 Seminar at B&H Photo on January 18 and features work from a selection of artists who have been involved with the various F295 events over the past 2 1/2 years.

Following an aesthetic strategy of search and discovery, World in a Jar: War & Trauma utilizes the camera as a cultural tool to curate and re-imagine key components from historical and original images to explore the workings of our collective societal memory involving loss, popular culture, religion, tragedy, and the nature of evil over the past four centuries.

Using the Shoah as it point of departure, World in a Jar is a free-form sculptural montage that rethinks the customary linear narrative by offering a supermarket of moveable images. The original installation consisted of 850 individual image jars, each one serving as an interchangeable viewing block, allowing it to be a perpetual work in progress that recreates itself each time it is installed. This permits each photograph to not only present its own split-second historical reference, but also informs the context and interpretation of the surrounding images. There are no captions to anchor the images to particular events, which allows the images to transcend their specific time-based circumstances. Rather, images freely float in an ambiguous and enigmatic space, encouraging viewers to interact and expand meanings based on their own experiences. This engagement is a reminder how photographs continue to seduce us into believing that they are objective records, when in fact all images are not what they initially appear to be and require thoughtful interpretation. This open-ended production, emulating how the puzzles and paradoxes of our own memories are constructed, can convey an endless tale about the human condition that exists outside of chronological time.