Photography Forum at Zenclay

Photography Forum

2-4 PM on Monday, Sept. 27^th 2010

   Morgantown is really a city of scientific activities. The photography forum held in Zenclay on University avenue to discuss the issues of what makes art photography, photojournalism, documentary photography, etc. a distinct genre. There were about 16 attendants. Nancy L Abrams was major speaker. She is a writer/photographer/editor and wit.

   Abrams said that she has arranged this forum in this small cafeteria “Zenclay” as she has had long term relation with the owner. There were about 25 black and white pictures in the first floor of this cafeteria. These photographs have different dates starting from the seventies up to the past ten years. All of them were taken by Abrams along her long career in media.

    The forum was held in the second floor of the cafeteria. The cafeteria has only two floors. Talking about her profession, Abram said “Words and Pictures are my life”. She added “camera is power, people follow the orders of the photographer”.

    Judith Gold Stitzel was one of the attendants. She is an ex-professor at WVU. She had many comments. The most prominent comment is that she said “Objectivity is a big lie”.

Stitzel said that documentary photography was mainly politically oriented

    The majority of the attendants were students from Art 333 class which is called Alternative Photography. The students talked about their documentary projects that must be submitted to their teacher. One of the students said that the topic of her project is ‘The Decline of Industrial World in West Virginia’. The teacher of these students is Michael Sherwin who attended this forum and was one of the major speakers in it. He discussed the issue of subjectivity in the captions that were written under each photograph taken. He said that he asked his students to write for their projects using economic, environmental or societal topics with minimal editing by Photoshop as documentary photography should have minimal manipulation.

    As a response to a question about the possibility of the death of photojournalism, Abrams said that this is not possible as there should be someone always that must go out and take pictures for any media outlet. As a proof for this, one of the attendants was the photographer of Dominion Post ‘the city newspaper’.

    I asked her about the possibility of having photography as an independent major and may be an independent school at universities, she answered ‘yes’, it is a valid possibility.