BRATTLEBORO — Vermont-based photographer Jen Morris presents a talk, “Landscape Photography and the USA,” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) on Thursday, Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m.
Morris plans to discuss the ways in which landscape photography historically has reflected notions of cultural identity in the United States.
An internationally exhibited photographer in her own right, Morris received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998, her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, and is an associate professor of art at Landmark College in Putney, where she teaches digital photography. She also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.
Morris said she will draw on her enthusiasm for the history of photography to convey her theme: art doesn't come from nothing, but is bound with events, ideas, and living history of the real world.
Among the works she will discuss are those of:
• Ansel Adams and Group f/64, which, through their photographs, helped protect the National Parks, particularly Yosemite National Park, and helped promote a new Modernist aesthetic based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
• Timothy O'Sullivan and Brady Lewis, who were instrumental in helping settle the American West. O'Sullivan took many of the first photos to record the prehistoric ruins, Navajo weavers, and pueblo villages of the American Southwest.
• The Civil War photos of Matthew Brady and O'Sullivan, which, through helping create the birth of photojournalism in the United States, harnessed photography as a powerful ideological tool.