Six Shooters Panel Discussion
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp St.
Tuesday, Dec 8, 7-9pm
Free and open to the public
This moderated panel discussion will feature six photographers from various disciplines discussing their processes, influences, inspiration and work. The third in an ongoing series produced by the New Orleans Photo Alliance, the PhotoNOLA edition of Six Shooters will feature an accomplished mix of local and visiting photographers, each bringing a unique perspective to the table.
Featured panelists are: Jane Fulton Alt (Chicago, IL), Sesthasak Boonchai (New York, NY), David Halliday (New Orleans, LA), Andy Levin (New Orleans, LA), Ellen Susan (Savannah, GA) and Linda Troeller (New York, NY). Dan Cameron, founding Director and Chief Curator of Prospect New Orleans and Director of Visual Arts for the CAC will serve as moderator. The program will include a slideshow with examples of each photographer’s work and allow for time at the end for questions from the audience.
Please join us for a lively insightful and informative group discussion.
Artists Bios:
Jane Fulton Alt
Jane Fulton Alt was born in Chicago in 1951. Alt attended the University of Michigan (BA, 1973) and the University of Chicago (MA, 1975). She has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Alt is the recipient of numerous awards and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, New Orleans Museum of Art, Beinecke Library at Yale University, University of Illinois Comer Archive, Southeast Museum of Photography, Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, De Paul University Art Museum, and the private collections of Rick Bayless and William Hunt. Alt is the recipient of the 2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award and the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. She has also authored a recently released book, Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. In addition to photography she is a licensed clinical social worker with a practice of 35 years.
Alt’s photographs explore universal issues of humanity, reflecting an interest in the mysteries of life and the non-material world. Her photographs ask us to consider issues of love, loss, and spirituality, which transcend notions of race, religion and culture.
Seth Boonchai
Sesthasak Boonchai, a lens-based artist and educator, was born in Bangkok, Thailand and grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. His works run the gamut from drawing to photography to site-specific installation. Throughout his works, Sesthasak’s focus is a meditation on the relationships between humans and the spaces they inhabit. He studies the remnants and histories our detritus. Be it physical, mental or psychological, Sesthasak connects the idiosyncratic links between corners, candies and pop songs.
Sesthasak has taught at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Delgado College and the University of New Orleans. He has been a visiting artist at Jackson State University and Colgate University. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The MIssissippi Museum of Art, The New Orleans Museum of Art, and Tulane University (New Orleans). He has also had a number of solo exhibitions throughout the United States.
Sesthasak currently divides his time between Brooklyn, NY and New Orleans, LA. He is a faculty member in the BFA Photography department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
David Halliday
David Halliday’s photographs are about beauty – pure and simple. His primary subjects are carefully composed still lifes, portraits and landscapes, which he shoots on film using only natural light. He is a purist behind the lens, rarely manipulating his negatives in any way, and a master in the darkroom. His work has an ethereal quality that’s translated not only through the subject, but also by the warm sepia tones he uses in his printing.
David Halliday resides in New Orleans and exhibits internationally. In 2002 he was given a mid-career retrospective, “When Time Stands Still,” at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. A limited collectors edition monograph, “The Perfect World of David Halliday,” was published by 21st Editions in 2003. Halliday’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Hunter Museum of American Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as several corporate collections. He is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, Kevin Longino Fine Art Photographs, Carrie Haddad Gallery in New York and Packard /Reath Gallery in Delaware.
Andy Levin
Andy Levin is a New Orleans based photographer and founder/editor of 100Eyes, a web magazine showcase featuring the best in contemporary documentary photography and photojournalism.
In 2008, Levin was a finalist for the Eugene Smith grant for documentary photography for his project on the effects of environmental change on low-lying areas of the world.
He began his career in 1980 as a staff photographer for the Black Star agency. A Life Magazine photo essay on the 1983 farm bankruptcy crisis won Levin first place in the prestigious National Press Photographers Association Contest. Levin continued to contribute to Life until the magazine closed in 2000.
Levin’s personal black and white work on Coney Island has been published in Reportage and Graphis as well as both Life and Popular Photography. He has participated in more than fifteen Day in the Life book projects. In 1984, he came to New Orleans for a Day in the Life of America story on the Charity Hospital emergency room. Two decades later, Levin moved to the Big Easy to document and participate in the city’s rich culture.
Levin’s post-Katrina work has been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, US News, GQ, Rolling Stone, US News World Report and People and is in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Ellen Susan
Ellen Susan was born in Detroit. She has also lived in Virginia, Providence, Boston, New York City, New Orleans, and Jersey City, NJ. She now lives in Savannah, GA. She earned a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her ongoing “Soldier Portraits” series depicts contemporary American soldiers via the Civil War era wet collodion process. Work from the series has appeared in solo shows at the New Orleans Photo Alliance, the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and at several locations in Georgia. Work from the series has been represented in group exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta and is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston among others.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah in 2010 and the Columbus Museum in 2011. Her work will also be included in a group exhibition of southern women photographers at the Mobile Museum of Art in 2010. Ellen Susan is a nominee for the 2010 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.
Linda Troeller
Linda Troeller is an internationally exhibited photographer whose long-term projects are focused on health, women, sexuality and community. She has six books including Healing Waters (Aperture) and her editorial images are published in the New York Times to Le Monde. Her project, TB-AIDS DIARY, won both Women of Achievement and Ferguson Awards (1989). It has been translated into eleven languages and is still being exhibited around the world. Troeller’s new book “Chelsea Hotel: An Artist’s Memoir,” is supported by a travelling exhibition which has recently shown at University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Melkweg Galerie, Amsterdam; and F-stop Foto-festival.
Troeller’s awards include Pictures of the Year, 1992 and a Self-Portraiture International Photo Award in 2008. She has lectured on her art practice at Yale University, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons, Paris among others. Her work is collected in major art museums including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Musee de L’Elysee, Switzerland.
Troeller received her MFA and MS from Syracuse University and BS from West Virginia University. She is represented by Agence Vu, Paris and Grazia Neri, Milan.
Moderator: Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron is founding director and chief curator of Prospect New Orleans, a new international biennial whose first edition opened in November 2008 at multiple sites around the city, and closed January 18 of this year. He also serves as Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.
Cameron was Senior Curator at the New Museum from 1995 to 2006, where his exhibitions included survey or new-work exhibitions by, among others, Eugenio Dittborn, Carroll Dunham, Teresita Fernandez, William Kentridge, Los Carpinteros, Nalini Malani, Paul McCarthy, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Marcel Odenbach, Pierre et Gilles, Faith Ringgold, Doris Salcedo, Carolee Schneemann, Francesco Vezzoli, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, and Xu Bing.
In 2003 Cameron was Artistic Director for the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006 he co-organized the 10th Taipei Biennial. In 2006 he was the curator of ‘New York, Interrupted,’ the inaugural exhibition for pkm Gallery Beijing. In 2008, as guest curator for the Orange County Museum of Art, he organized a retrospective of the American painter Peter Saul.
Cameron currently serves as Senior Curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and is a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York.
