In 2015, AZPM’s Andrew Brown produced an outstanding video feature, “The Lives of Pictures” about the history of the Center for Creative Photography at the time of the 40th anniversary, interviewing co-founder Dr. John P. Schaefer and Founding Director Harold Jones.
It is an important timestamp in the history of the center as we now celebrate the 50th anniversary. A fun look back … here is the video and a transcript.
- CCP at 50: Center celebrates with “Picture Party”
- Center for Creative Photography | Arizona Public Media
AZPM’s “The Lives of Pictures”
Dr. John P. Schaefer, President Emeritus, Co-Founder
“We have one of the world’s largest collections of photography. It is certainly the biggest collection of the work of American photographers in existence anywhere.”
Harold Jones, Founding Director
“It’s a kind of national treasure, really.”
Schaefer: “There’s nothing else like it in the world.”
Joshua Chuang, Chief Curator
“So really, really fascinating. So, if we can exhibit this object, I’d be so, yeah, I’d be so thrilled. Yeah. So, this is a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz of another photographer named Paul Strand. There’s a curious inscription on the back of it that says, ‘faded Statista print.’ We plan to exhibit it next to this picture, which is a picture of Alfred Stieglitz by Paul Strand. You know, we have here in two objects, the two giants of modern American photography photographing each other. It’s quite fantastic.
“Right now, we’re in the middle of installing an exhibition called “The Lives of Pictures.” My colleague Becky Senf and I are co-curating, and it’s a show that draws from our collection.”
Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Curator
“’The Lives of Pictures’ is a way to celebrate the history of the Center for Creative Photography. And so we hope that our audience will be both surprised by the things they see and that their idea of what the center is and what the collection can do will be expanded through this exhibition.”
Chuang: “The exhibition really is also celebrating our 40th anniversary, our 40 years of collecting at the Center for Creative Photography.”
Schaefer: “Well, one thing we did was to invite Ansel Adams to have a one-man show at the University of Arizona Art Museum. And I had the idea that, nobody was really collecting photography at the time. During the opening of the show, I got to know Ansel and asked him if he wouldn’t like to give his archives to the University of Arizona. He was a little bit surprised by such a quick and blunt request, but he said, ‘If you’re willing to think about photography beyond my own personal work, I’d like to talk to you.’”
Chuang: “We started the collection with the, the archives of five, very, very well known, very well-respected photographers, and those were Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer, and Aaron Siskind.
Senf: “From that beginning, we’ve continued to add archives. We have archives of over 200 photographers and galleries and researchers that make up our archive collection.
Schaefer: “Largely through the efforts of Harold Jones, who was our first director and really a key to setting what the center was gonna be all about, how it was to function.”
Jones: “The good news was there was nothing like it. The bad news was there was nothing like it. This, the center was a chance to design an institution that didn’t just have their pictures, which lots of institutions then had photography, but to have their archives, their correspondence, their memorabilia to be able to study the complete person, the whole person.”
Senf: “One of the great things about an archive is that you don’t just have the greatest hits or the masterpieces. You have the work and the working prints and the alternate. All of that material helps give texture to our understanding of Ansel Adams’ most famous picture.
Chuang: “So when did Adams intensify the negative?”
Senf: “I knew you were gonna ask me that. I knew you were gonna ask me that. We know that Ansel Adams was in the town of Hernandez, New Mexico in 1937. He was on a trip with Georgia O’Keeffe. They drove across New Mexico and he visited the chapel at Hernandez. He walked all the way around the chapel and made photographs. We have proof prints of those negatives that he made. And so, we know that on that day in 1941 when he made the famous Moonrise picture, he had been to that little town before.
“There’s a moon rising over the mountains, and there’s this opportunity at a beautiful picture. If I can put the right thing in the foreground.”
Schaefer: “It’s a dramatic photograph. It’s Wagnerian in many ways, in terms of drama, quite beautiful. And, yeah, that’s one of my favorite photographs of all time.”
Jones: “Certainly Ansel was the name everyone knew, but when they heard people like Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer … in the photography world, that was like having Bach and Mozart and all in the same place. So that attracted other people. Now, my guess is there’s more people who’d like to have their work here than there is possibly the staff to take care of it.
Senf: “This is dedicated to Sonya Noskowiak, who is Edward’s apprentice and his lover at the time. So we have the Edward Weston Archive, but this print came to us from Sonya Noskowiak because it was a gift from Edward to her, and then it came with her materials to us. And so we have the very first print of “Pepper Number 30” with this beautiful inscription in Edward Weston’s hand, and it has a kind of aura about it. It’s the object. It’s the first example of Edward Weston making a print of this pivotal image in his career.
Jones: “The pictures on the wall are one instant that’s taken a thousand instances to get it, ready to find it, to frame it, to put it on a wall. It’s a tremendous amount of work.”
Chuang: “Photography as a medium, I think is one that really, takes the stuff of real life. There’s always some space, some ambiguity between what you see in the picture and what’s actually happened.”
Schaefer: “Photography is the nation’s attic, actually. It’s where we store memories. It’s where we keep things that are important to us and maybe even things that we’d rather not remember, but don’t want to throw out either.”
Jones: Photography kind of brought me from where I grew up, which was kind of a dark place into a world of great possibilities. There was something in photography, which is often referred to by people who talk about it as magic, that something happens in the picture. Now, I still don’t know what it is, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what it is. Still, human beings are so remarkable and so rich.
Senf: “The collection at the Center for Creative Photography allows us to understand how this medium, that’s part of our regular daily language now, got to this point. And to be in the presence of an art object that can take a hold of you, grab you, and move you out of yourself to someplace else. That’s, I mean, that’s what art’s all about.”