This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

Few photographers are as closely associated with a major city as Zoe Strauss is with Philadelphia. Between 2001 and 2010, Strauss explored the complexities of contemporary urban America in a series of annual one-day outdoor photography exhibitions, set up under Interstate 95 in Philadelphia. Strauss called the project and the pictures on display “an epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Both the choice of venue, a disused space under a major traffic artery running through the city, and her compelling photographs shown there revived and updated the tradition of socially-engaged American street photography. In this talk, Strauss will discuss her relationship with Philadelphia and her use of photography and political outreach to engage wider audiences and revive troubled urban neighborhoods.

Strauss’ work was featured in a major mid-career exhibition, Zoe Strauss 10 Years, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2012. In 2006 she participated in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2008 she published her first book, America. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, and the Wexner Center for the Art, Columbus, among other international institutions. She is the Richard Grubman and Caroline Mortimer Photographer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2016.

Strauss’ talk will open the exhibition A View of One’s Own - Three Women Photographers in Rome: Esther Boise Van Deman, Georgina Masson, Jeannette Montgomery Barron, which features a selection of photographs by foreign women in Rome from three successive generations, all of them connected to the American Academy. Their work confronts aspects of the Eternal City and its urban transformation over more than a century, from the Belle Époque to the present day. At the same time, it tracks the emergence of photography as an independent medium wielded by women with distinctive viewpoints, as it evolved from a documentary aid to a vehicle for subjective, even gendered expression.

The event is part of La Quadriennale in città (16° Quadriennale d’Arte) and FOTOGRAFIA, Festival Internazionale di Roma.

The lecture will be held in English.

EXHIBITION EVENTS:
Exhibition Opening
13 October 2016
6pm-9pm, AAR Gallery

Lecture EVENT CANCELLED
Letizia Battaglia
The Photographer and the City - Palermo
3 November 2016
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

EXHIBITION HOURS:
Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, 4pm-7pm
until 27 November 2016
The exhibition will also be open on 26 October, 3 November and 10 November from 5pm to 8pm.