Connections, Resemblances, and Associations

Last week, I gave a lecture and presentation on my work as a guest at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. The slide talk went very well, and the audience was wonderful.

Every time I give a slide presentation of my portfolio, I try to update it to include my latest work. Not only does it keep the talk fresh and up to date, but it gives me the opportunity to reinterpret some of the older images and sometimes see things in a new context.  Looking at some of the older images with a broader and more developed understanding of the work can provide new insights on what I've done in the past. In preparing for my talk at The Annenberg, I did something I've been meaning to do for a long time...

When I made the image I call "Dead Silences", I was in my second year of grad school. In a critique with 8 fellow students and the professor, one student mentioned that it reminded them of a "Janus" face. Rather than admit that I had never heard of "Janus" before, I nodded in agreement with most of the other students who seemed to understand what this statement meant. I did however research it afterwards, and was surprised at just how accurate this observation was:

According to Wikipedia- "In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past."

The resemblance of Janus in this image still fascinates me to this day, and was only the first of several instances in which one of my images resonated with an unintentional reference.

I had been thinking about this a lot since seeing the connection between one of my recent images and Masaccio's "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden".  For the slide talk at The Annenberg, I thought it might be fun to illustrate some of the other inadvertent analogies that have appeared in some of my work...

- Click the jump below to read more -

IRIS Nights Presents: An Evening With Connie Imboden

Reflections: An Evening with Connie Imboden Thursday, March 22, 6:30-8:00pm Connie Imboden has spent more than 30 years using photography to examine, distort and redefine the human body. Imboden's work is in the collections of many major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Bibliotheque Nationale in France and the Ludwig Museum in Germany. Her photographs have been exhibited in an extensive range of group and solo shows at galleries and museums throughout Europe, the United States, South America and most recently China. Her first book of images, Out of Darkness, won the Silver Medal in Switzerland's "Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)" competition in 1993. Her most recent book, Reflections was released in 2009. Imboden currently teaches photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art as well as many workshops around the world. Imboden's photographs, seen through the camera and free from darkroom or computer enhancement, display the strangeness of reality in an age of digital manipulation. She will discuss the technical issues involved in relying on her vision to transform the subject matter and how an intuitive creative process has kept her fascinated with the same body of work throughout the years. Tickets for this event will be released online on Wednesday, March 14 at 12 noon and Thursday, March 15 at 9:30am. Once tickets are released, you may register by clicking here. Each person is limited to two tickets. Please note that our lectures tend to fill up quickly. Don't be discouraged if you are unable to get tickets through our online ticketing system. The standby list for each lecture begins at 5pm on the day of the event in person at the Photography Space. About 10 minutes prior to the start of the lecture, we release any seats that have not been claimed by ticketholders to our standby guests. Out of respect to our speaker and the other guests, late arrivals to the lecture are discouraged.

FOR MORE EVENT INFO, CLICK HERE!

The Annenberg Space for Photography | 2000 Avenue of the Stars, #10 | Los Angeles | CA | 90067

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lynda.com debut!

Back in June, I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Ben Long at The Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute workshops.  In addition to his work with many magazines such as MacWeek, MacUser, Macworld, and CreativePro.com, Ben is also a regular contributor to lynda.com, an award winning online instructional video library.

lynda.com produces thousands of video tutorials and training on various topics.  While most of their video's feature courses on software, they have been working towards focusing on where creativity and technology intersect.  Some of their latest videos are aimed at educating not just the practical aspects of a given discipline, but the artistic understanding and creative vision that can be applied.

Ben Long's Foundations of Photography series has been a huge success with lynda.com, addressing technical knowledge of photography with an understanding of the aesthetics of it as well.  Following our work together during the summer at Quartz mountain, Ben and I were reunited for fall courses at The Oklahoma Arts Institute.  The folks at lynda.com took the opportunity to incorporate the workshop into a new course Ben was working on for the site,  Foundations of Photography: Composition.  We were followed by a camera crew who filmed our lectures on creativity, intuition and seeing, as well as critiques and discussions with the students.




This was such a new and fantastic project to work on, and it was wonderful to work with Ben and everyone from lynda.com.  The Foundations of Photography: Composition video series was published on lynda.com on 12-23-11 and has already been a huge success, highlighting as one of the most viewed courses.  I highly encourage anyone interested to check out the series, you won't be disappointed!

New Images on the Website

Just added a handful of new images to the portfolio section of the website!

I've continued working with the mirrors in color, most recently playing with gels to have more control over the color and how it defines the form.  The color has brought a more dynamic element to the images, and the colors I've begun incorporating have been slightly more bold than they were previously.

Check out the 2010-present section at ConnieImboden.com to see some of the latest work!

Provincetown Workshop 2011

Another recent workshop I had the honor of teaching at was the Photography Workshops at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  I've been a part of this workshop for the past 4 years, and every year has been an incredibly fun and fantastic experience.

For one thing, Provincetown is SUCH a cool place.

The Parade

The workshop was August 14th-19th, which happens to be one of the biggest weekends of the summer for this little town.  On August 18th, we had the chance to see the town's Gay Pride Parade, a truly outrageous, fun, and all around extravagant event.  It was such a blast, you never knew what was next...

OSAI Workshop in Oaklahoma

Last month, I was honored to be part of a workshop at The Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at the beautiful Quartz Mountain Arts and Conference Center.  The two week long intensive program is aimed at the education and advancement of high school age students in the arts, including acting, creative writing, ballet, modern dance, orchestra, chorus, drawing and painting, photography, and film and video.  It is an amazing academy and an excellent resource for gifted young artists.  I found the students to be fantastic, all of them bright, enthusiastic and eager to learn.


Team Photo

Working alongside brilliant photographers Konrad Eek and Ben Long, I knew we were in for a great time when these two knuckleheads launched an impromptu 20 minute comedy routine to kick things off...

  Konrad teaches photography at Oklahoma City Community College and runs Maxwell Eek Design Photography, a commercial photography studio focused on product and fashion photography for wholesale and retail catalogs.  Ben is a San Francisco based photographer with a long list of commercial clients, a longtime contributor to many magazines including MacWeek, MacUser, Macworld UK, and is currently a senior contributing editor for Macworld magazine and a senior editor at CreativePro.com.  His book, Complete Digital Photography, now in it's 6th edition, has become something of an industry standard.  Together, the three of us formed "Team Photo" and had a blast sharing our diverse passion and knowledge of photography.  (Taking notes myself during their lectures, I found the students weren't the only ones who had something to learn.)

Georgia Review Summer 2010 GAMMA Awards

Last summer, my work was featured in the Summer 2010 issue of The Georgia Review, and I was honored to have one of my images featured on the cover.  A highly regarded literary journal that features everything from short stories and essays to poems and visual art, it's diverse content and outstanding quality has won The Georgia Review many awards throughout the years.

This month, the Magazine Association of the Southeast awarded The Georgia Review with seven GAMMA awards for 2010.  I was thrilled to hear that the Summer 2010 issue won a Silver Award for "Best Photography" in the General Excellence Category for my portfolio, entitled "Danse Macabre".  The title was taken from a long poem inspired by my work written by Susan Ludvigson, who also wrote the introduction for the feature in the journal.  I couldn't be happier with the introduction and how the whole piece looked in The Georgia Review, and I'm ecstatic about the Silver GAMMA Award!

Click here to order a copy of The Summer 2010 issue of the Georgia Review.

For more about the seven awards given to The Georgia Review, click here to read about it on their blog.

Or click here for the press release.

For a complete list of this year's GAMMA Award Winners, click here.