Seminar:
The Value of the Image
Date:
Thursday 31st July 2008
Time:
1pm
Venue:
Lecture Theatre, Aston Business School, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK
Tel:
0121 773 7889
Email:
info@rhubarb-rhubarb.net
Web:
www.abs.aston.ac.uk
Price:
£30/£25 concessions and Rhubarb Review attendants, booking essential please email to reserve a place.
Speakers:
Alison Nordstrom – Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York
Stephen Mayes – International Image Forecaster, New York
Simon Roberts – Award Winning Photographer, London
Conceptualised and chaired by Rhonda Wilson - Creative Director, Rhubarb-Rhubarb
Three remarkable people with a wealth of experience in the fields of
Fine Art/Documentary/and Commercial/Stock photography discuss The Value
of the Image at a time where technologies and economics are
inextricably bound up in the futures of emerging and mid career
photographers, and the ability of those already 'up there ' to remain
so.
Far from simply being a question of producing ‘good’
images, the demands on photographers - to be smart in business and
savvy in protecting themselves and their images from real time and
virtual exploitation, keeping their agents happy, selling work and
finding the resources to finance new projects – are the harsh realities
for anyone wishing to stay alive in the increasingly complex ladder of
opportunity within the image sector.
In this fascinating
seminar, Simon Roberts gives a contemporary account of the skills
involved in becoming and remaining an international photographer of
repute;
Alison Nordström
will discuss the acquiring and caring for work in perpetuity - how
working with museum collections is fundamentally different from working
with sales galleries, temporary exhibitions or alternative spaces and
Stephen Mayes will be predicting the future with the demise of
copyright and the rise in the value of the web for selling ideas.
Simon Roberts
discusses how he moved from a First Class Honours Degree in Human
Geography to the winner of the ‘Ian Parry Award’ (1998), the ‘Vic Odden
Award’ from the RPS (2007), one of the rising stars in the Independent
on Saturday Magazine’s prestigious ‘Talent Issue’(2007), with a major
book success – ‘Motherland’ (Chris Boot Publishing, 2007), and grants
from the National Media Museum and Arts Council to support his new
project ‘We English’. How much of his value as an artist is due to
business savvy and how much to creative thinking?
Alison
Nordström is the Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House
International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York,
the oldest and largest museum of photography in the world. Previously,
she was the Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of
Photography in Florida for 11 years. In her 25+ years as a museum
worker, Nordström has initiated and overseen more than 2000 museum
acquisitions, including several artists’ archives. She is the author of
“Artists and Archives: Making the Match” in A Visual Artist’s Guide to
Estate Planning, published in 2007 by The Marie Walshe Sharpe Art
Foundation and The Judith Rothschild Foundation.
The talk
discusses how museums are charged with acquiring and caring for work in
perpetuity and how this results in a variety of specialized practices.
The talk covers such formal concerns as collections policies,
acquisitions committees and preservation issues as well as some of the
unofficial occurrences that may affect your museum dealings, such as
donations, discounts, editioning, preparation, materiality and record
keeping. She will also provide a brief discussion of legacy and estate
planning for photographers and their archives.
Stephen Mayes
has worked with photography, art and journalism for 20 years as a
Creative Director (Getty Images, Photonica and Eyestorm.com), and as a
CEO (of Network Photographers London’s leading independent reportage
agency, also Art + Commerce Image Archive New York, and the New York
division of amana - the Japanese photo company), and has curated
several internationally touring exhibitions. He is on the board of VII
Photo and is secretary of World Press Photo competition. He is renowned
throughout the industry as a man of ethical and visionary thinking.