PHOTOVOX DECEMBER 2020

MAKING A PHOTOGRAPHER: THE EARLY WORK OF ANSEL ADAMS

WITH DR. REBECCA A. SENF

SPEAKER | Dr. Rebecca A. Senf

WHEN | Wednesday, December 9th, 2020, 6:30 – 8 pm

WHERE | ONLINE (through Zoom – link is provided in the registration email)

COST | Free for CPAC Members; $10 for non-members

*The member discount is applied at checkout now*

ABOUT | We invite you to join us for December’s PhotoVox with speaker Dr. Rebecca A. Senf as she discusses her new book, Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams. Gain access to an unprecedented and eye-opening examination of the early career of one of America’s most celebrated photographers.

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams’ images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams’ career, Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams’ artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist’s mature oeuvre.
 
Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams’ photographic practice—beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist’s persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist’s environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club.

MEET OUR SPEAKER

Dr. Rebecca A. 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 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 Ansel Adams’ early years, called Making a Photographer, copublished by the CCP and Yale University Press.

ABOUT PHOTOVOX

PhotoVox is a monthly program offered by the Colorado Photographic Arts Center to help you strengthen your artistic voice with the support of other photographers and artists in the Denver Metro community. Meetings are held monthly at CPAC’s downtown gallery, and feature discussions led by local arts and community leaders. Three sessions per year are dedicated to portfolio sharing.