Literally Speaking Panel Discussion

Sunday, December 15, 2013
3:00 – 4:00pm

The CAC, in collaboration with PhotoNOLA, presents a special photobook focused panel of their Literally Speaking series. Three authors of recent photography publications, William Greiner, Russell Lord, and Tammy Mercure, will discuss their work as well as the publication process of photography books from concept to print. A multi-artist book signing including the panelists and others will follow.

Moderator: John H. Lawrence,
Director of Museum Programs, The Historic New Orleans Collection

Panelists:
William Greiner, Show & Tell (UL Press, 2013)
Russell Lord, Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (Steidl, 2013)
Tammy Mercure, Twelve Nashville Waffle Houses (TCB Press, 2013)

Bios:
John H. Lawrence is Director of Museum Programs at The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC). In his 35-year career at THNOC, Lawrence has held the positions of curator of photographs and senior curator and currently serves as the institution’s director of museum programs. In this role, the New Orleans native is responsible for planning and implementing museum exhibitions, lectures, seminars, and related activities; he is also the head of curatorial collections. He has written and lectured widely about aspects of contemporary and historic photography and the administration and preservation of pictorial collections. He has served as principal or guest curator for dozens of exhibitions on photographic, artistic, and general historical topics.

Lawrence chairs the Williams Prize committee of the Louisiana Historical Association and has been a contributing editor of the New Orleans Art Review since 1983. He holds degrees in literature and art history from Vassar College and a certificate in museum management from the Getty Leadership Institute, formerly the Museum Management Institute.

William Greiner (b. 1957) was awarded a BFA Photography from Tufts University (Boston), where he studied color photography with Jim Dow. Greiner’s first body of color work, The Reposed, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (New York) by John Szarkowski in 1991, with the acquisition appearing in a recent acquisitions show in 1992. The Reposed was published by LSU Press (1999). Other publications include A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (W. W. Norton & Company), Baton Rouge Blues (University of Alabama, 2006). Self-published books include Fallen Paradise: New Orleans 1995-2005 and Land’s End: Baton Rouge 2007-2010. University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press published Show & Tell in 2013. The book pairs Greiner’s work with short stories by various authors that were inspired by his photographs.

Russell Lord is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Lord previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, and has written widely on the history of photography. His recent publications include: Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument, and an essay in Edward Burtynsky: Water. He is also currently working on a book about the permanent collection at NOMA to complement the exhibition Photography at NOMA: Selections from the Permanent Collection (at NOMA through January 19, 2014). Other recent exhibitions that Lord has organized include: Photography, Sequence, and Time; Reinventing Nature: Art from the School of Fontainebleau; and What is a Photograph? Much of his research focuses on the relationships between photography and other visual media.

Tammy Mercure (b. 1976) was recently named one of the “100 under 100: The New Superstars of Southern Art” by Oxford American magazine. She has been featured on CNN Photos, Fraction Magazine, Daily Mail, NPR Big Picture Show, and more. She was published as the Guardian’s Big Picture, in Darwin magazine, and in the book “Place, Art, and Self” by Yi-Fu Tuan. She has a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from East Tennessee State University. She is currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. Mercure creates limited edition, hand-bound books through her imprint, TCB Press.