Picture Party

The Center for Creative Photography celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a new exhibition, “Picture Party,” curated by Rebecca Senf ’94 and Emilia Mickevicius.

Theirs is a happy collaboration. “Something exciting happens when you look at pictures together and not just alone. You can see shared trains of thought between different artists across time,” Mickevicius explains.

“Imagine entering a party; there’s buzz in the atmosphere. Small groups of people are talking and there’s a kind of raucous chorus in the background. That’s what we were thinking about in calling it ‘Picture Party.’”

On the gallery’s back wall, there’s a striking portrait of a young man — eyes closed, drooping mustache, slicked-back hair. It’s a self-portrait by Harold Jones, the founding director of the CCP. He arrived in Tucson in September 1975, just 35 years old, and headed the CCP for two years before moving over to the art department to build its photography program.

Jones also was a volunteer with the CCP’s Interviews and Oral Histories Collection, a combination of interviews, lectures, gallery walk-throughs and workshops with visiting photographers, curators and scholars.

The CCP was created by former University of Arizona President John Schaefer and the late Ansel Adams in May 1975. Today the collection holds some 120,000 photographs and 300 archives. Senf and Mickevicius had the daunting task of selecting just 100 pieces for this show.

Perhaps the most famous photograph in the collection is Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” It’s not in the show, but a tool that Adams constructed to make the print is: the burning board used in the darkroom to manipulate light exposure.

It’s Mickevicius’ favorite object on display. “It is literally one of a kind, a custom tool that not only gives us a behind-the- scenes look into how Adams printed that iconic image but also an object that he had a very tactile, embodied relationship with as he worked.”

The tool is a single piece of cardboard with a rectangular aperture cut through it. It looks like something you might throw away, but it’s the essential tool that enabled Adams to produce his elegant landscape with that bright streak of light set off from a very dark night sky.

Ask Senf for a favorite and she’ll tell you it might be Mariana Cook’s portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama taken in 1996, when the future president was a community organizer and preparing to run for his first term as an Illinois state senator. “I’m struck by their body language. Barack leans back, his face open. Michelle, on the other hand, has her chin tucked down and her body is between the camera and her husband, in a defensive stance. I’ve always thought that Michelle is thinking, ‘If you want him, you’re going to have to get through me.’”

Women are well represented in the show, both as photographers and as subjects. A strikingly pretty color print by Lucy Capehart stands out on the back wall. It’s a portrait of the Navajo weaver Sarah Natani. She’s holding a newborn lamb in a rustic corral on a sunny day in Shiprock, New Mexico, with a lovely cloudless blue sky in the background.

Famous Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide joins the party with “Señor de los Espejos,” a portrait of a man carrying two mirrors that reflect images of a busy public square in Quito, Ecuador.

Laura Gilpin is a celebrated photographer and writer of the American West, known especially for landscapes and portraits of Navajo and Pueblo peoples. Here, her platinum print “Illustration for Eliza M. Swift’s Poem, ‘On the Prairie’” shows a solitary woman in a flowing white dress in a dreamy prairie landscape.

One of my favorites is Nancy Floyd’s “Evolution of the Typewriter, 1983-2013.” It’s a print of six self-portraits taken over 30 years, from age 27 to 57. They reveal a creative woman at home surrounded by the objects of her work, from a manual typewriter to a laser printer.

Elsewhere in the gallery are two prints by famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. One is a portrait of Gen. David Birney. The other appears at first glance to be a forest scene, but hidden behind the trees a crowd of men is lined up in front of a military hospital. These prints were not made by Brady himself, but by Ansel Adams, long after Brady died.

Nearby is work by another photographer famous for Western landscapes, Mark Klett. Klett and his collaborators launched the Rephotographic Survey Project in the 1970s, returning to the exact locations where 19th century photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan took their photographs. On display here are small facsimiles of photos of Chicago Lake in Colorado, alongside the same scene photographed by Mark Klett, ingeniously displayed on top of topographic maps.

Photojournalist David Hume Kennerly was just 25 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his battlefront coverage of the Vietnam War. In 2019, the CCP acquired his entire archive of nearly one million artifacts, including prints and memorabilia such as the combat helmet he wore during his years in Southeast Asia. That’s on display, sharing a case with Ansel Adams’ iconic Stetson.

Charles “Teenie” Harris was an African American photographer from Pittsburgh, known for his portraits of everyday people. His archive is now at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1941, Harris made a portrait of a young Black soldier, Eddie Jackson, which is included in the CCP show. Jackson is in a dress uniform, with corporal stripes on his sleeve, holding a collection of military medals.In the background is a framed certificate recognizing his service in England during World War II.

Another Pulitzer prizewinner represented in the show is African American photographer Ozier Muhammad. His print, “Blown Headlines,” captures a lone man in a hooded sweatshirt walking on 125th Street in Harlem on a windy, bitter-cold day in 2006.

A really fun party is lively and unpredictable. The 100 objects and images in this show offer plenty to spark conversations among eager partygoers: from Edward Weston’s wedding ring to Lola Alvarez Bravo’s sunglasses; from the chubby cheeks of a Chinese baby to black-and-white studies of a clenched fist, a bended knee and a naked torso.

As Senf puts it, “This is truly just the tip of the iceberg of what the collection can do and its potential. And that, for us, feels really exciting.”