Blogging from SPE in Denver, Colorado

I arrived in sunny Denver yesterday for the Society of Photographic Educations' 45th National Conference Agents of Change: Art and Advocacy. There has been a lot to see and take in. So far one of the highlights of the conference has been Jessica Liebermans' lecture Traumatic Images. Liberman is an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at RIT and gave a brilliant presentation. A one sentence summarization of the lecture might be: " Photographs inherently share the same structure as trauma." Professor Lieberman had a lot of interesting points including her own term "traumatic facticity."Patrick Craig Manning says that "she is the only person that he has read/heard talk that speaks to his work." Professor Libermann mentioned by the way, that research is being done on developing a traumatic pill that will erase our unpleasant memories. Wow, as someone pointed out in the lecture, "How would we decide what was pleasant and what was not"?

As usual, there are a lot of organizations and companies in the trade show and I have a pile of info on the latest digital papers, catalogs for books, equipment, etc. etc. One of the vendors that stood out to me was a Berkley based custom digital book maker called Edition Studios One. I have been interested in digital publishing for several years now and have had digital books made with Lulu, Apple, and Blurb (though I have never got Blurb to transfer another blog of mine to book form correctly and hence I have not printed with them yet). Edition Studios One is a very small company that looks like it may provide something between the bigger on-line publishers and a traditional fine art book maker. I am looking forward to learning more about their services.

Later today one of my former mentors in graduate school, Patrick Nagatani, will be recognized as the honored educator. There will be a University of New Mexico reunion tonight in Patricks' honor.