This season FotoFika is working on a crowdsourced cookbook for photographers, educators and students featuring recipes for photographic chemistry, living a purposeful life, a killer meatloaf and plenty of beverage options.

FotoFika meetings are every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 4 pm Eastern!

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/93761631388?pwd=eTYxL0NSVkVNWDh4SnVhclFXTEorQT09

Meeting ID: 937 6163 1388

Passcode: fotofika

https://www.radiusbooks.org/

https://fotofika.org/

Meet with us on Wednesday, September 15th, at 4 pm Eastern! This year we’re taking on a new approach to working with all of you. Come back to say hello to friends, stay to hear about the new project!

What do mini-marshmallows have to teach us about taking risks, building instinct, being vulnerable, and the way personal interests can influence professional practice? Join the Center for Creative Photography’s chief curator, Rebecca Senf, as she links personal learning and development of “soft skills” to her photo historical work and research.

Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by the University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and recently published a book on Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, copublished by the CCP and Yale University Press.

FotoFika meetings are every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 4 pm Eastern!

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/93761631388?pwd=eTYxL0NSVkVNWDh4SnVhclFXTEorQT09

Meeting ID: 937 6163 1388

Passcode: fotofika

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spenational/fotofika-2020-all-stars-trading-card-project

There are 11 days left to the 2020 All Star Kickstarter campaign, where we are raising money to send every student who participated a free deck of cards with their images included. We have a $2000 challenge pledge which will match your contribution dollar for dollar until midnight tonight. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spenational/fotofika-2020-all-stars-trading-card-project

Just over a year ago the International Center of Photography initiated the hashtag #ICPConcerned. David Campany, reflects on how it became an exhibition and book that democratized the curatorial exchange between image maker and museum. With over 800 images from 70 countries, the project looked at devastation and hope in a time of pandemic and civil unrest. Join us to hear about this collective endeavour that occurred both online and in the museum at ICP.

https://icpconcerned.icp.org/

David Campany is a curator, writer and Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York. He has published over 200 essays and authored seventeen books including On Photographs (2020), and Art and Photography (2003). Last year he curated the six-museum Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie.

See you WEDNESDAY, April 14th, 4pm EST at:

ZOOM ID:

https://zoom.us/j/93761631388?pwd=eTYxL0NSVkVNWDh4SnVhclFXTEorQT09

In 2020, the pandemic impacted graduating students in a profound way. Thesis shows were cancelled, graduations were unique to say the least, and many students felt shorted by the last days of in person learning. But with difficult situations comes new ways of celebrating the next generation of photographers….and so The FotoFika 2020 All Stars Project was born.

Strange Fire re-imagines how their archive can bring long-lasting change to the institutions educating the next generation of thinkers. They developed tools to utilize and interpret their archive in  classroom settings, making it easier for educators to find the resources we need to diversify our curriculums.

Strange Fire: The Strange Fire artist collective is a group of interdisciplinary artists, curators, and writers focused on work that engages with current social and political forces. Strange Fire is a platform for work that critically questions the dominant social hierarchy, dedicated to highlighting work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists. Their collective practice is centered around increasing the visibility of meaningful work and creating dialogue and community through publications, exhibitions, and events. Strange Fire was formed in 2015 by Jess T. Dugan, Hamidah Glasgow, Zora J Murff, and Rafael Soldi.

Rafael Soldi, Co-Founder: Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian­-born, Seattle-based artist and curator. He holds a BFA in Photography & Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss. He has exhibited internationally at the Frye Art Museum, American University Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, ClampArt, The Print Center, Museo MATE, Filter Space, and Burrard Arts Foundation, among others. Rafael has received grants and awards from the Magenta Foundation, Puffin Foundation, smART Ventures, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and Center Santa Fe. He has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, PICTURE BERLIN, Oxbow Space, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

His first monograph, Imagined Futures, was published in 2020 by Candor Arts,

His work is in several permanent museum collections and has been reviewed on ARTFORUM, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Photograph Magazine, The Seen, Art Nexus, and PDN. He is an SPE board member, co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, and co-curator of the High Wall, a yearly outdoor video projection program that invites immigrant artists to intervene the facade of a former immigration center building in the heart of Seattle.

Keavy Handley-Byrne, Educational Resources Coordinator, Content Contributor: Keavy Handley-Byrne is a photographer and writer. Handley-Byrne holds an MFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in photography from Purchase College, SUNY. Keavy’s work addresses issues of queer identity and gender, with a particular focus on finding joy in the wake of trauma and loss. Their work has been featured online with A New Nothing and StayAtHome.Photography, and has been exhibited across the United States. Keavy is currently working with both the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Photographic Education, as well as the LGBTQ+ Caucus as their Northeast Chapter representative, and is pursuing collegiate teaching as a profession. They are currently based on Lenape and Canarsie land (Brooklyn, NY).

See you WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17th, 4pm EST at:

ZOOM ID:https://zoom.us/j/93761631388?pwd=eTYxL0NSVkVNWDh4SnVhclFXTEorQT09Zoom – PWD – fotofikahttps://zoom.us/j/93761631388

John, Betsy, Anne

P.S. Please consider donating to our Kickstarter campaign for our 2020 All Star Trading Cards:

ZOOM ID:https://zoom.us/j/93761631388?pwd=eTYxL0NSVkVNWDh4SnVhclFXTEorQT09Zoom –

PWD – fotofika
https://zoom.us/j/93761631388

John, Betsy, Anne

And for those who weren’t able to attend our Feb 3 session, Max’s PDF can be found here: Max_Kan_Fotofika_2021

This week: ASU School of Art JEDI lecture series will host Sarah Lewis this Thursday February 18 at 4PM (Arizona Time) 6PM Eastern Time.

John Anne and I are all crazy busy right now– like so many of you. But we also realize how important it is to keep these connections and conversations going as we approach the 1 year– geez–one year anniversary of, it doesn’t even really have a name or an exact date–but that time during March of 2020 when our lives changed.  We are all in some ways waiting for things to get back to something, but I think everyone knows there is no going back so the conversations have gradually been shifting towards addressing more long term issues that will continue beyond the pandemic. As John, Anne, Becky and I negotiate launching the 2020 All Star Cards Kickstarter campaign, I am aware of how time has moved forward and how it hasn’t. We are also realizing that the Class of 2021 is also facing a compromised and different spring semester of their senior year– their whole final year of college or even for some more than half their graduate school experience, is radically different from what they expected. So first, we are thinking about that, about the difference between the emergency situation for last spring, and the much more long term adjustments and changes that we are all facing now–and yet, and still, I for one find it both difficult and inevitable to try to plan for something a bit more normal.

I wanted to blog here to highlight the upcoming Kickstarter launch for the cards, to get people ready for our idea for the Class of 2021, and to highlight some of the recent and upcoming FotoFika sessions as well as highlight some other related conversations.

Two weeks ago FotoFika hosted Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Max Kandhola in discussion about expanding the canon and really examining what we need to consider as we make our classrooms and our field inclusive of all experiences and perspectives, particularly in relation to ethnicity and race. A discussion which barely begins to scratch the surface and something that is not easy, especially for those of us who have made our way, who have established a way of being in the world, who stand in front of a classroom and get authority from our educations and tenure– This conversation that they graciously agreed to help us start by bringing us into their experiences and lessons  started by asking people to examine and be willing to reinvent–must continue.  And we must be willing to constantly examine what we think we know, from methods of teaching, to the set of slides we show, to how hard we work to correctly pronounce unfamiliar names to how we gain our authority. It is not easy. And some of us will have to give up power so that we can fairly share it.  Opening up places to talk about it and being willing to question what we think we know is essential. And not easy. Much more to come on this topic.

This week we will take a slight, but related turn and discuss mental health in the classroom, in academia and in art. Like all college educators, we have students at a particularly vulnerable point in their lives during a particularly difficult moment in history and this has exponentially increased the stakes for our behavior in the class room and our responsiveness. As we all know the art classroom is not like a science classroom. Tangents are at the core of the experience and fluid boundaries are often the point. Subject matter weaves itself in and out of our personal lives and our work. Many of us take pride in nurturing openness and expression of the inarticulable, dark and painful.  Its not all Covid related– but somehow it for me at least seems overwhelmingly intense– and I am someone who thrives on intensity. How do we talk about this? How do we take care of our students–what are the resources for the students? What are limits of our responsibilities? And how do we pay attention to our own mental health? This Wednesday we welcome Marianna Chiokan as we begin to address these questions and more on FotoFika.

We really hope to see you this Wednesday  at 4PM (EST) and stay tuned for our All Star Cards Kickstarter Launch!

Betsy