A one-day symposium bringing together photographers, academics, students and collectors to celebrate the photographic book.

The Reva and David Logan Book Symposium brings together photographers, academics, students and collectors to celebrate the photographic book. The biennial event, which launched in 2017, is provided for under the 2013 endowment at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism that funds exhibits in the Berkeley Journalism Gallery. The first Logan Professor of Photojournalism is documentary photographer Ken Light.

The events complement the Logan Photo Book Collection at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, which brought the late David Logan’s exceptional collection of photography books to the campus.

With special thanks to:

Speakers

Sarah Meister is Executive Director of Aperture, following more than twenty-five years in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. At MoMA Sarah curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions including Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography (2021); Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020) and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (cocurator, 2017). Her publications have considered Gordon Parks (2020) Frances Benjamin Johnston (2019), the 1967 MoMA exhibition New Documents (2017), Bill Brandt (2013), and many more. She was the inaugural instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs, and co-director of the August Sander Project, a five-year research initiative at MoMA/Columbia University.

 

 

Ben Brody is an independent photographer, educator, and picture editor working on long-form projects related to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their aftermath. He is the Director of Photography for The GroundTruth Project and Report for America, and a co-founder of Mass Books. His first book, Attention Servicemember, was shortlisted for the 2019 Aperture – Paris Photo First Book Award and is now in its second edition. His latest book, 300m, is a panoramic journey through the height of the American war in Afghanistan, framed in the context of the fall of Kabul and the ties that remain with friends and colleagues who currently live under Taliban rule. Ben holds an MFA from Hartford Art School’s International Low-Residency Photography program, and resides in western Massachusetts.

 

Michelle Dunn Marsh, a first-generation American of Indo-Burmese and Irish descent, has led a bi-coastal professional existence in visual book publishing for nearly thirty years. She conceived, and with Steve McIntyre co-founded Minor Matters, a collaborative publishing platform, in 2013. Minor Matters has realized 26 books in print thus far through the active participation of a global audience, resulting in “first books” for more than ten artists. Dunn Marsh is also a committed educator, and achieved tenure as a professor of graphic design in 2003. She continues to lecture nationally and internationally on photo literacy and distinct elements of visual book publishing. She is the author of Seeing Being Seen: A Personal History of Photography, and the editor of The Kid Contracts: A Family Memoir on Writing Your Way Out of Trouble, among other publications. Dunn Marsh holds an MS in Publishing from Pace University, and a BA from Bard College. She currently splits her time between Seattle and New York.

Lucas Foglia (b. 1983) is a fine art photographer engaged in environmental activism. His photographs of people in nature are hyperreal, lyrical, and often inexplicable. He received his BFA from Brown University in 2005 and MFA from Yale University in 2010. He has numerous international publications, including four monographs: A Natural Order, Frontcountry, Human Nature, and Summer After. Foglia has had over 30 solo exhibitions at galleries, festivals, and museums, including Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago. His prints and public installations are represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in New York, Micamera in Milan, and Michael Hoppen Gallery in London.

 

Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries — and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. He photographs to preserve memory.

Jim Goldberg’s innovative use of image and text make him a landmark photographer of our times. His long-term projects include Rich and Poor (1977-85), Raised by Wolves (1985-95), and Open See (2003-2011), for which he was awarded the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011. Goldberg’s works are in numerous collections including the: Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty, LACMA, National Gallery of Art, Alinari National Museum of Photography in Florence, Le Musee de la Photographie, Belgium, and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany. Goldberg is represented by Casemore Kirkeby Gallery in San Francisco, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) wanders endlessly, taking lengthy road trips in search of imagery that connects with his own memories. Through his unique landscape process and signature color palette, Hido alludes to the quiet and mysterious side of suburban America—where uniform communities provide for a stable façade—implying the instability that often lies behind the walls. His photographs are in many private and public collections, including at the Getty, Whitney Museum of American Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Pier 24 Photography holds the archive of all of his published works. Hido has published more than a dozen books, including the award-winning monographs House Hunting (2001) and Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013), as well as innovative B-Sides Box Sets, which function as companion pieces to his books. His Aperture titles include Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude (2014) and Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs (2016). His latest book is Bright Black World (2018). His upcoming publication, which was titled before the pandemic, The End Sends Advance Warning, will be published in 2023. Hido is also a collector, and over the last twenty-five years has created one of the most notable photobook collections, which was featured in Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books (2019).

Christine Hult-Lewis has been the curator of the Reva and David Logan Collection of Photographic Books at The Bancroft Library since 2014, and the interim pictorial curator there since 2021. The Logan Collection is an extraordinary group of rare and unique books, monographs, and serials amassed by Reva and David Logan over half a century. Christine has taught classes on the history of photography and photographs of the American West at Boston University and UC Berkeley. At Bancroft, she curated exhibitions on California painting, the Logan photobook collection, community and identity in western photography, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. She co-authored the award-winning study of nineteenth-century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs (Getty, 2011), and her most recent publication is an essay on postwar women’s photobooks in the award-winning book What They Saw: Historic Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks, 2021). Christine holds a BA from UC Berkeley and a PhD in American Studies, with an emphasis in photographic history, from Boston University.

Ken Light has worked as a documentary photographer focusing on social issues facing America for over 50 years. His work has been published in twelve books, including, Course of the Empire, Midnight La Frontera, What’s Going On? 1969-1974, Coal Hollow, Delta Time, To The Promised Land, With These Hands, Texas Death Row and Valley of Shadows and Dreams. He is also the author of the text Witness in Our Time: Lives of Working Documentary Photographers in its second edtions and Picturing Resistance. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowships and the Dorothea Lange Fellowship. His work has been in numerous magazines, newspapers and a variety of media (electronic & film), and presented in over 230 exhibitions worldwide including one person shows at the International Center for Photography (NYC), Oakland Museum of California, S.E. Museum of Photography, Visual Studies Workshop, Visa pour L’image Perpignan (France) and the San Jose Museum of Art. He was the first photographer to become a Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley.

Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African-American communities in the Southern United States. He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White, and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans. In 1982, he became an art professor at the University of Tennessee, where he founded the university’s photography program. He began to photographed the people, landscapes, and cities of the South. He soon realized that he had a particular passion for the African-American communities he had interacted with. From 1983 to 1989 he produced roughly 10,000 photographs in these communities. This project would consume Lee for the remainder of the decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people, and himself. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984 and his work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Yale University Art Gallery.

Pablo Ortíz Monestario is considered one of the most influential and active figures in contemporary photography in Mexico and Latin America. In 1994, he founded the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, the most important photography forum in Mexico and a venue for the education, discussion and promotion of photography in Mexico, which included extensive educational photography and exhibition programs such as the Bienal de Fotografia and Fotoseptiembre. Monasterio was born in Mexico City and would go on to study economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and photography at the London College of Printing in England. He has served as an editor on various book projects, including Mexico Indígena, as well as the periodicals Río de Luz and Luna Córnea. In 1995, Monasterio published La Última Ciudad – The Last City, a kaleidoscope of dynamic, dramatic black and white street photographs of Mexico City that evoke an apocalyptic atmosphere of an immense metropolis ravaged by poverty, crime and the ill-effects of overpopulation. In 2001 he was the curator of the PhotoEspaña festival in Madrid. He is the author of numerous photo books.

Born in Berkeley, and raised in the suburb of Walnut Creek, Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West. Her projects explore a wide range of subjects with a clear aesthetic, from her suburban roots in The White Sky to urban and rural dystopias in Landfall and The Golden City. In the 1970s, she photographed the United Farmworkers as they organized for union elections. Throughout her career, Plumb’s photographs convey narratives that are simultaneously ominous, seductive, and compassionate. She is currently photographing the impact of climate change in California. Plumb has published three monographs, Landfall (TBW Books, 2018), The White Sky (Stanley/Barker 2020) and The Golden City (Stanley/Barker 2021). Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Plumb taught photography for 28 years at various institutions including San Jose State University, San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Douglas Stockdale (American) is a visual artist, book-nerd and science-geek. Stockdale’s artistic investigations focus various aspects of memory, family, mental health and the environment while being fascinated by science. He has been published in seven books and featured in numerous others, and his artwork is in the permanent collections of Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO, Rome), San Telmo Museo (San Sebastián, Spain), Reminders Photobook Library (Tokyo), Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University, Boston), Frick Fine Arts Library (University of Pittsburgh) and many others. He has been featured in numerous articles in conjunction with his solo and group exhibitions.

He is Senior Editor & founder of PhotoBook Journal, the contemporary photobook magazine, on the adjunct faculty of the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP), Medium Photo and Southeast Center for Photography (SEC4P). His studio is located in Orange County, CA and he will sometimes magically appear on Facebook, Instagram and his art/photo blog, Singular Images. Concurrently he is a senior scientist for a pharmaceutical company working on a therapeutic for Sickle Cell Disease.

Deborah Willis Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute of African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation, contemporary women photographers, and beauty.

She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Dr. Willis’ curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments in the KIA” Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts,;”Home: Reimagining Interiority” YoungArts Gallery, and “Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory” FotoFocus.

Dr. Willis was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. Fellow and recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art.

Community Partners: