Lone Tree Arts Center launched its Changemaker Speaker Series this year. It’s hosting speakers who’ve excelled in their careers and made an impact on society. The second speaker in the series is Jodi Cobb, who was the first female field photographer hired to the staff of National Geographic magazine.

“I never believed that I would see so many things and go so many places,” Cobb told CBS News Colorado anchor Karen Leigh.

In her 40-year career, Cobb has gone to the ends of the Earth, documenting cultures and people for National Geographic.

“The Huli Wigmen are the most dramatic culture that I found,” Cobb said.

She went on to explain that the Huli Wigmen of Papau New Guinea weave elaborate headdresses made out of feathers, flowers and their own hair. Cobb described her exposé  on “21st Century Slavery” as her most important, most satisfying, and most terrifying story.

Sometimes she found the ordinary in extraordinary places.

“That’s what you need are the moments. The moments that bring a person and a scene to life,” she explained.

Cobb agreed that being the first female field photographer in the magazine’s history was an honor, but also acknowledged that the honor came with a lot of really hard work.

“I really had to prove myself every single day of my career,” she told Leigh.

While she competed with the men, she said that she felt drawn to the lives of women. She was the only photographer allowed into the secret world of the Japanese Geisha in 1992.

“So one of the things that was most interesting for me in my career was how I was able to find these cultures and places that were right on the edge of incredible change. The Geisha world will never be the same as when I was there,” she said.

“How does it make you feel to know that you’re capturing those moments and educating the rest of the world with your photos?” Leigh asked.

“I feel really lucky that I was able to see these places and these cultures and get inside their world,” Cobb replied. “That’s what I loved the most was going into world that outsiders would never see.”

LINK: Through the Lens: Hidden Worlds with Jodi Cobb

Jodi Cobb will be speaking on Friday, March 8, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. at Lone Tree Arts Center as part of its Changemaker Speaker Series.

WEST CHESTER — An exhibit of her work opened Wednesday, to mark long time West Chester University Photographer Erica Thompson’s retirement.

Focus Lost and Found and Treasures Along the Way runs until April 10. The exhibit is displayed by the Department of Art+Design at Knauer Gallery, Swope Music Building and Performing Arts Center, 817 S. High St. The exhibit is free and open to the public. Hours are Monday – Friday from 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.

In Focus Lost and Found Thompson shares a biographical retrospective showcasing personal and professional photography and other work that spans her 30-year career. Some work includes WCU campus photography. Work by Thompson’s parents – also artists – is also on display.

Thompson began working at WCU in 2006 as a graphic artist after spending more than 20 years as a commercial artist working for various firms in publishing and advertising. She became the official West Chester University staff photographer in 2018. She received her BFA at West Chester University in 2010 as an adult. Thompson will retire as staff photographer this spring, according to a university release.

The photographer who shots from 9,000 to 12,000 images per semester said in a phone interview that the best part of the job is getting to know the students.

“I enjoyed getting out and interacting with everyone,” she said. “I get to experience every aspect of the university.

“I enjoy the people and the diverse campus. A lot goes on and I get to be privy to everything that is happening.

“I try to capture the excitement.”

The artist especially enjoyed covering commencement ceremonies and the President’s Gala.

Personal highlights included watching the longtime campus coal power plant come down and the university’s move to more sustainable energy. She watched the building of the new science and engineering center near the plant’s old space.

Thompson worked closely with WCU President Chris Fiorentino and his wife Susan and photographed the pair in action thousands of times.

“Erica is a true artist who captures the heart and soul of West Chester University,” Fiorentino said. “Having worked at the University for numerous years, first as a designer and now as a staff photographer, she literally knows everyone on campus and is an important member of our community of educators.

“Her many talents and love for the University will be truly missed, but she will remain with us through the numerous photographs that she has taken over the years. All of us wish her the very, very best.”

Thompson developed a love for photography at a young age. A family friend who was “always around” documented her early childhood. Thompson would play with his gear and she developed a love for taking pictures and documenting.

Her parents were artists.

“Aesthetics played a significant role in my childhood home,” Thompson said. “My memories are of summers assisting in mom’s arts and crafts garage and Saturdays perched on a stool in dad’s basement studio while working at his side.

“I was raised to relish adventure and to hunt for treasure. At my core I am still that precocious little girl; eternally curious, and craving immersion in the natural world.”

The artist talked about her exhibit.

“Ultimately, the message I want to convey as patrons walk through the gallery mirrors the daily affirmations I learned to tell myself,” she said. “The world and all living things are beautiful and complex and teach us so many lessons.

“The camera is a tool that helps me to capture and share what I find beautiful.”

On view in the Center for Feminist Art, the exhibition includes forty-seven women artists, including Yto Barrada, Bettina von Zwehl, Sarah Pickering, and Vanessa Beecroft, and examines gender, nationhood, and the male-centric development of photography as a medium.

On view March 8–July 7, 2024

In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection unites forty-seven emerging and established women artists who are expanding and challenging notions of gender, nationhood, and the practice of photography itself. Drawn from a recent gift of the Haukohl Photography Collection to the Brooklyn Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the exhibition highlights photo-based artwork made since 2000 by women artists born or working from more than sixteen European countries. Building on the first iteration of the exhibition, on view at LACMA in 2021, the Brooklyn Museum presentation features fifteen new artists from the Haukohl collection and illuminates the collection’s feminist underpinnings. The works on view investigate issues of migration, the legacies of nationalism in Europe, and the male gaze as patriarchal power structures continue to shape life and politics in Europe. By pushing the boundaries of photographic methods and techniques, the artists also resist the male-centric focus of the history of photography.

Organized into three thematic sections, the exhibition is located in the Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which is centered around Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79). Chicago’s landmark installation presents a now-canonical critique of male-centric Western history, to which the diverse array of photographers of In the Now provide a twenty-first-century rejoinder. While Chicago reimagines Western civilization through the lives and achievements of women, artists like Carolle Bénitah, Anna Rackard, and Aida Silvestri use the camera to focus on personal and political stories of family, labor, and migration. Others, including Alexandra Croitoru, Eva Koťátková, and Melanie Manchot, capture the social and patriarchal pressures women face.

“We are grateful to Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl, whose generosity has made this exhibition possible. The show inspires new narratives about the Brooklyn Museum’s photographic collection by prioritizing important contributions by women photographers. This directly supports the Museum’s mission to provide expansive encounters with art, inspire courageous conversations, and celebrate our communities,” says Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

The Gender section contends with representations of women’s bodies, as artists react to the personal and political realms of oppressive beauty standards, religion and law, and the history of art. Bettina von Zwehl situates the photographic portrait within the long multimedia history of portraiture with her 2016 series The Sessions. The series comprises fifty silhouette profiles of the same six-year-old girl, their edges torn and distorted to allude to the multiple facets of one individual. In Nu descendant un escalier (2020), Elina Brotherus asserts her role as an artist in front of and behind the camera. By restaging Marcel Duchamp’s 1911–12 Nude Descending a Staircase paintings using herself as the model, Brotherus reflects critically on the female nude, the male gaze, and gender norms in art.

In the Nation section, the artists unpack the social and generational fallout of European colonialism and nationalism. For Papiers Pliés (2007), Yto Barrada collected and folded recycled paper wrappings used by snack-food vendors in her native Tangier, Morocco. The printed French words on the wrappers indicate the sheets’ original function as forms from a textile factory, alluding to the legacy of France’s colonization of Morocco (1912–56) and the economic industries that propelled it. Sarah Pickering’s Landmine (2005) and Artillery (2005) depict the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. Upon closer inspection, they are revealed to be small-scale simulated explosions, reminding viewers of the relative peace “at home” in England while British troops supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Artists in the Photography section grapple with a changing medium that has historically been hostile and exclusionary to women. Some engage early photographic methods in new ways or adapt found photography. Others reject the boundaries of the medium by incorporating painting, performance, film, and textiles, the last imbuing their work with the gendered politics of art forms historically categorized as “women’s work.” In La cartina indiscreta (Indiscreet Map; 2022), Carmen Calvo assembles found images around the body and face of a nude woman as she stands behind a translucent curtain, evoking Surrealist artists to comment on the woman’s pronounced visibility and simultaneous entrapment. Silvia Rosi’s Self-Portrait as My Father (2019) chronicles her family’s migration from Togo to Italy. Dressed as her father in a suit and tie, the artist marks her father’s change in status by surrounding herself with tomatoes, the crop her father picked as a migrant field worker in Italy. By holding the shutter release in the photo, Rosi signals her own identity as the photographer and steward of her family history.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the collection titled The Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Collection of European Women Photographers, 2000–2020. Published by Steidl and edited by Manfred Heiting, the catalogue includes an essay by Rebecca Mark, Director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership and a Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University.

In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Drew Sawyer, former Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum; Britt Savelsen, Curator and Head, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings Department; and Eve Schillo, Associate Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, with Imani Williford, Curatorial Assistant, Photography, Fashion, and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum.

About the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection

In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced the joint acquisition of two hundred contemporary photographs by women artists from seventeen countries in Western and Eastern Europe. The generous gift comes from Houston-based collector Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl, whose expansive collection has been built over the course of twenty years and showcases an impressive range of styles and approaches to photography from that period. This is the Brooklyn Museum’s largest joint acquisition as well as the largest gift of contemporary photography ever received by the Museum, and it bolsters its long-standing commitment to collecting works by women artists.

IMAGE: Ulla Jokisalo (born Kannus, Finland, 1955). Wasteland, from the series Collection of Headless Women, 2015. Inkjet print, pins, 23 5/8 × 16 in. (60 ×40.6 cm). The Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, TL2020.6.77. © Ulla Jokisalo, courtesy Persons Projects (Photo: courtesy of the artist)

The press release and the photographs are courtesy of the gallery and the artists.

When Musée Heritage Museum opened its main exhibition space this past Tuesday, it was flooded with wildlife images photographed in western Canada. 

St. Albert photographer Dave Conlin showcases The Wild Side: Polar Prairie Pacific. It is a stunning collection that captures fascinating animal behaviour, spectacular species in private moments and the breathtaking diversity of the natural world. 

Conlin’s 39 photographs document animals’ daily lives as they hunt for food, avoid predators, mate, nurture their young, fight, play, rest and survive the seasons. He captures a mother grizzly teaching her cub to fish for salmon, a curious coyote, a startled moose and playful wolf cubs. 

From coyotes foraging on St. Albert’s open landscapes and bison herding calves on Alberta’s grasslands to protective grizzlies in northern British Columbia and sea lions jumping off Vancouver Island’s rocky shores, the collection tells important stories and advocates for a future that respects the animal kingdom. 

In moving from photograph to photograph, the collection encourages curiosity, wonder and connection. In addition, the images convey the human impact on the natural world, especially with declining biodiversity and protected species. 

Conlin’s photographs taken around St. Albert and Sturgeon County are obtained on walks with his dog. But when travelling in British Columbia or Manitoba, he chooses to invest in knowledgeable guided eco-tours who obtain special licenses to operate regulated photography tours. 

His mission while photographing the incredible mammals in Canada, is to redress the lopsided balance of mammals living on the planet. Booking eco-tours instead of heading into wild territory alone is both safer and less destructive to the environment. 

“Did you know that only four per cent of mammals on the planet are wild? The other 96 per cent are humans and livestock,” said Conlin. “Every time I take a picture, I’m taking something from nature. I might be stepping on a flower or blowing CO2 in the environment. As a photographer, I have to be careful what I take out. But I try to put something back and I’d like to encourage people to think about what they do.” 

Through the collection, Conlin explores forests, frozen tundra, wetlands and shorelines. Although he began his photography hobby in 2001 with a Canon S40, he now favours the Nikon D500. 

“Nikon’s feel in my hands and the way the controls are laid out are perfect for me. I’m used to the system – the colour and the picture quality. It works for me.” 

He has photographed the rare, white-coated black bears also known as Spirit Bears in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. While travelling in a zodiac, he’s taken images of a herd of sea lions lounging in the sun. And he’s had the opportunity to encounter a wolf family frolicking on a shoreline. 

However, not all eco-tours are smooth. On his first tour of the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary riding in a boat, a group of photographers were eager to capture images of a mother grizzly and her cub walking near the tree line. 

“The cub decided we were a curiosity and came towards us. I was at the front of the boat. We were grounded and at this point the guide decided to push off and jumped out of the boat. Since the cub kept coming, I ducked to the bottom of the boat thinking the mother would come after her cub. But the mum gave a huff and the cub walked off.” 

Museum curator Martin Bierens is a strong supporter of Conlin’s work, not only because the composition is breathtaking. But also due to the conservation message. 

“Right now, we have many animals around us, but there’s no guarantee they will be with us forever. We hope viewers will think about how we can better conserve these animals … and support them while we all live in harmony,” Bierens said. 

To complement The Wild Side: Polar Prairie Pacific, the exhibition introduces three of the museum’s stuffed animals: a bear, wolf and porcupine. 

Conlin is also hosting a talk on wildlife photography at the museum on Saturday, March 9 at 3 p.m. It will centre around photography of the Big Lake area. It will be followed by a Q&A. 

In addition, he will host a series of photography tours around Lois Hole Provincial Park on April 20 and 27, May 4, 11 and 18 from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Preregistration is required. Visit www.artsandheritage.ca. 

ROCKLAND — The Rockland Public Library presents Benjamin Williamson, Thursday, March 21, at 6:30 p.m. This event is free and open to all.

Maine-based professional photographer and educator Benjamin Williamson will share some of his phenomenal work in this illustrated presentation. Williamson has been working professionally as a photographer for a decade. When asked what he seeks to connect with when making photos, he said: “The first thing that comes to mind is standing in awe and wonder at nature and natural phenomena — especially dramatic weather. I’m also fascinated by how human beings fit into the natural world in symbiotic, beautiful, and ingenious ways. I love showcasing the places and spaces that bring us close to nature and close to each other.”

Benjamin Williamson leads photography workshops across Maine and around the country. From 2016 to 2022, he was the staff photographer, photo brand coordinator, and adventure leader for Down East Magazine. He lives in Bath with his family. You can learn more at benjaminwilliamsonphotography.com.

This event will be held in-person at the Rockland Public Library, located at 80 Union Street, and simultaneously screened over Zoom. For more information or to request Zoom links, please email elewis@rocklandmaine.gov by 4 p.m. on March 21.