Bruno Chalifour | SUNY: Empire State College (original) (raw)

MA (English) and post-graduate studies in France.
Current dissertation at Université Louis Lumière / Lyon 2: "La photographie de paysage aux États-Unis de 1960 à 1990 : contexte et émergence de problématiques nouvelles (ontologiques, esthétiques, et politiques)." [2019]

MFA SUNY Buffalo.

Certified professor (English), France.

Experience:

Taught photography in France and the USA (Centres culturels Limoges, Éducation Nationale, University of Rochester, SUNY Buffalo, Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo, Empire State College, Community Darkroom).

Taught English and French for Education Nationale (France) 1978-1998.

Secrétaire du Comité Départemental pour la Photographie de la Haute-Vienne (1981-1994).

Worked as a professional portrait studio photographer, photo-journalist and journalist, art critic, fine-art photographer (many exhibitions over a period of 40 years including George Eastman House, Image City Gallery, Spectrum Gallery, Link Gallery, Community Darkroom, RIT, VSW, Rochester Contemporary, CEPA, UC San Bernardino Gallery, Centres Culturels Limoges, Voies Off (Arles)...).

Editor Afterimage Magazine (VSW) Dec. 2002 — Jan. 2005.

Director/curator Spectrum Gallery (Rochester NY) Jan. 2014-June 2015.

Greentopia 2014 Photo project coordinator.

Essays and reviews published in "Afterimage" (Rochester NY), "Ciel Variable" (Montréal), Photofiles (Sydney), "Photography and Culture" (Oxford, UK), "Réponses Photo" (France), "L'Écho [du Centre]" (Limoges), "PhotoVision" (USA), www.photophiles.com...

Portfolio reviewer at Fotofest (Houston TX), Rhubarb-Rhubarb (Birmingham, U.K.), Le Mois de la Photographie à Montréal (Canada), Les Rencontres d'Arles and Voies Off (Arles, France).
Supervisors: Pr. Jean Kempf (Université Lyon 2 Louis Lumière) and Université Lyon 2 Louis Lumière

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Ciel variable : art, photo, médias, culture, 2019

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2005

Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 from cancer, a disease she had been battl... more Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 from cancer, a disease she had been battling for years. Born in New York City on January 16, 1933, Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona and her adolescent years in Los Angeles. At age 15, she entered the University of California at Berkeley, transferring to the University of Chicago a year later. She studied literature, philosophy and theology at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, Paris and Oxford (England). By the late 1960s she had acquired a strong reputation as an essayist and a novelist. In the following years she would extend it to being a playwright and a film and theater director as well as a social, cultural and political critic. She served as the president of the international writers' organization PEN from 1987 to 1989. She was also a long-time human rights activist. Her voice in American cultural and intellectual life asserted itself through her contributions to various periodicals such as The Partisan Review, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harpers'. The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. It was for this last publication that she started what was intended to be a two-part essay on photography and ultimately expanded into a collection of six essays that were published in 1977 as the book On Photography. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A multi-talented writer and brilliant essayist, Sontag expressed herself on a variety of topics: literature, the visual arts, politics, human rights, ethics, AIDS, popular culture, war, pain, memory, disease--the human condition at large. Upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, she stated: The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. [...] I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. (1) Faithful to the philosophy of famous essayists such as George Orwell, Edward Said, Albert Camus, as well as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre (on both of whom she wrote), Sontag believed that there should not be a gap between intellectual activity, society and life at large. She applied her intellect to everything she encountered and for which she cared. All issues had to be analyzed and assessed in the light of ethics and politics. She denounced any disconnection between the two. On Photography brought Sontag instant recognition in the visual art world as an astute, witty, insightful, critical, abrasive and even confrontational essayist. People in the field either loved the essays and book, or hated them. She left almost no stone unturned and carefully scrutinized and criticized every one that she picked up. Oscillating between revelations and caricatures, Sontag's text drew a multitude of comments and rapidly became a bestseller in the visual arts. Sontag noted, analyzed and commented on the vast impact of photography on our culture--from the years following its invention until very recently--and the way we view and interpret the world. "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. …

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2004

Photography in New York No, this text is not about the very useful publication Photography in New... more Photography in New York No, this text is not about the very useful publication Photography in New York, but an homage to it; it has now become Photograph and provides invaluable information to whoever wants to stay informed on photography shown in the Big Apple (also available on-line at: http://www.photographyguide.com). With the first days of February comes one of the major events of the photographic year in New York: the Photography Show sponsored by the Association of International Photographic Art Dealers (AIPAD) at the Hilton hotel on 6th avenue and 53rd street. This year the show opened its doors without "supporting" exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, or the Guggenheim. Apparently synergy is a tough goal to achieve in New York; in fact, the Stephen Cohen Gallery is also announcing a new event competing with the AIPAD show or extending it (the Stephen Cohen Gallery is a member of AIPAD). After "Photo L.A." last January, "Photo San Francisco" next July. "Photo New York" is scheduled for next fall. 2004 also happens to be the 100th anniversary of Bill Brandt's birth. A new book of the British photographer's best images is being published in England by the Bill Brandt archive while Stanford University Press just released Bill Brandt, a Life by Paul Delany. Chair of the Department of English at Simon Fraser University (B.C.). AIPAD decided to honor the British photographer by reproducing one of his photographs on the cover of the catalogue of the show ("Doing the Lambeth Walk. 1939"): unfortunately, nothing else happened to support this gesture, no show, no lecture. MoMA is usually a block away, but due to renovations, it is currently stationed in Brooklyn until the re-opening of its Manhattan quarters next year. Its next show will be Ansel Adams at 100 by John Szarkowski! The Metropolitan did not, this year, repeat last year's initiative when the Thomas Struth retrospective not only coincided with the AIPAD show but was part of it. 2004 is a biennial year for the Whitney, whose programming has been somewhat flat for a while, lacking energy and innovative initiatives, especially in the department of photography: funds might be partly responsible for the current state of things. The Guggenheim seems to survive in the wake of its Matthew Barney show. The museum had nothing on show and looked almost more enticing with its momentary atmosphere of absence/extra-minimalist display and pervading longing for art. It had for a while given its power back to Wright's architectural genius after storing Barneyis cheap props (the museum may have had a different financial experience though), and pseudo-postmodern mental bric-a-brac. The exception these days seems to be the International Center of Photography. Under Brian Wallis's curatorial leadership, ICP has soared to new heights and its recent shows have established it as the most dynamic, and stimulating photographic institutions in the world. Hardly had their first triennial closed its door that Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self, the fruit of 4 years of intensive research and collaboration with Coco Fusco (collaboration is definitely a key ingredient in Wallis's working method) opened. Three other events seized the opportunity that the Photographic Show provided as it attracted photo aficionados from all around the country and beyond--although it seems that photo fairs as well as "Months of Photography"/biennials are spurting everywhere resulting in less travel. These events included: the Lotte Jacobi retrospective at the Jewish Museum uptown, the release of Richard Misrach's new work both on the cover and on the pages of Aperture's latest issue, and on the walls of the Pace/McGill gallery in Chelsea, and last, but nct least, the now-ritual auctions at Christie's and Swann's. One other show benefited from the AIPAD annual fair: Mark Osterman's wet collodion images in Confidence at the Howard Greenberg Gallery until March 13 (read interview in this issue of Afterimage, pp. …

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2003

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 2004

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Sep 1, 2003

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Sep 1, 2004

When did you begin to create installations? When I was 6 or 7 years old, the street and sidewalk ... more When did you begin to create installations? When I was 6 or 7 years old, the street and sidewalk were my gallery. I made installations to display on the front steps to share with everyone who passed by, though I kept the one with urine specimens to myself (my father was a physician). I had excellent peripheral vision (lazy eye syndrome) and was instructed to practice seeing with a prism, to synthesize the two distinct, and different visual fields. When I was twelve, I collaborated with my father, who was also a Civil War buff, on making a battlefield diorama. He would capture our family in 3-D with a stereo camera and in film. I picked up imaging techniques from him. I enjoyed the ex-citement and shared viewing experience associated with movies and slide shows. We would pass around a lighted stereo viewer to look at the 3-D slides, whose dramatic layered space suggested an actual depth that made printed photographs look flat, compressed. He taught me to shoot movies and edit in the camera, which gave me a heightened awareness of space and time as well as an affinity for photography and innovative approaches. When I was enlisted in setting up the shots for his movies and stereo slides, it felt like making installations to me. Empty spaces have meaning for me. To me nothing is empty; gaps are stories. Space is full of stories of inclusion and exclusion. Things that are left out have always been important to me. The question I always ask is why. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I began making installations in the early '70s, as my shaped paintings extended into viewer space in a search for ways to eliminate the frame and illusion. I began making large geometric, sprayed lacquer corner pieces that existed in real space (the space of the viewer), involving the viewer in the process of visually deconstructing linear perspective [metonymic in my work for a default orthodox perspective, -Western science, -authority figure]. The viewer's movements, reversed perspective, and mirror finish suggested multiple contradictory interpretations, and contained a feminist subtext. Installation suggested a location to respond to the art historical bias against space, to the sexist, Western subtext privileging form over space (form = positive/male, space=negative/female). Lacking a male default point of view, installation could allow me to incorporate autobiographical material, develop a female subject position in real space where visual arts intersect with politics, science, technology, and life. Painting felt too well-behaved (like a box), sculpture seemed too fixed. Photography lets the viewer look through someone else's eyes. Installation was not default white male elitist art like painting and sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Interests in content, process, feminist art, conceptual art, and the role of the viewer, brought me back to making installations after a decade of painting. In the early 1980s, working in a large studio in downtown Washington D.C., I began working in real space with non-art materials, such as tar paper and screen. At the time, my paintings--as well as most of the art of museums--seemed too irrelevant, too class-based, too white. I was interested in power relations and public space, point of view and context, and searching for a tool for critiquing hierarchies, systems, orthodoxies, and scientific specialization. Installations put all boundaries into question, including public/private ones that silence minorities and women, and art/life divisions that kept viewers at a distance. As presentation installation art makes boundary crossing into ritual transgression, I wanted to work in the space of the viewer, to make art that existed in the space between life and art, a shared space that included the viewer and time. Installations affirm connections and public space, and are less hierarchical and distancing than painting or sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A response to Reagonomics, UnEmployment Division (1983) was an interactive performance installation in which viewers waited in line, answered questions, filled out forms, as they went from office to office (installation to installations) en route to a national homeless shelter, the "Classified Ad Lounge" (installation). …

Ciel variable : Art, photo, médias, culture, 2011

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Ciel variable : art, photo, médias, culture, 2011

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Ciel variable : Art, photo, médias, culture, 2012

[

Ciel variable : art, photo, médias, culture, 2019

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2005

Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 from cancer, a disease she had been battl... more Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 from cancer, a disease she had been battling for years. Born in New York City on January 16, 1933, Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona and her adolescent years in Los Angeles. At age 15, she entered the University of California at Berkeley, transferring to the University of Chicago a year later. She studied literature, philosophy and theology at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, Paris and Oxford (England). By the late 1960s she had acquired a strong reputation as an essayist and a novelist. In the following years she would extend it to being a playwright and a film and theater director as well as a social, cultural and political critic. She served as the president of the international writers' organization PEN from 1987 to 1989. She was also a long-time human rights activist. Her voice in American cultural and intellectual life asserted itself through her contributions to various periodicals such as The Partisan Review, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harpers'. The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. It was for this last publication that she started what was intended to be a two-part essay on photography and ultimately expanded into a collection of six essays that were published in 1977 as the book On Photography. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A multi-talented writer and brilliant essayist, Sontag expressed herself on a variety of topics: literature, the visual arts, politics, human rights, ethics, AIDS, popular culture, war, pain, memory, disease--the human condition at large. Upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, she stated: The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. [...] I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. (1) Faithful to the philosophy of famous essayists such as George Orwell, Edward Said, Albert Camus, as well as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre (on both of whom she wrote), Sontag believed that there should not be a gap between intellectual activity, society and life at large. She applied her intellect to everything she encountered and for which she cared. All issues had to be analyzed and assessed in the light of ethics and politics. She denounced any disconnection between the two. On Photography brought Sontag instant recognition in the visual art world as an astute, witty, insightful, critical, abrasive and even confrontational essayist. People in the field either loved the essays and book, or hated them. She left almost no stone unturned and carefully scrutinized and criticized every one that she picked up. Oscillating between revelations and caricatures, Sontag's text drew a multitude of comments and rapidly became a bestseller in the visual arts. Sontag noted, analyzed and commented on the vast impact of photography on our culture--from the years following its invention until very recently--and the way we view and interpret the world. "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. …

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2004

Photography in New York No, this text is not about the very useful publication Photography in New... more Photography in New York No, this text is not about the very useful publication Photography in New York, but an homage to it; it has now become Photograph and provides invaluable information to whoever wants to stay informed on photography shown in the Big Apple (also available on-line at: http://www.photographyguide.com). With the first days of February comes one of the major events of the photographic year in New York: the Photography Show sponsored by the Association of International Photographic Art Dealers (AIPAD) at the Hilton hotel on 6th avenue and 53rd street. This year the show opened its doors without "supporting" exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, or the Guggenheim. Apparently synergy is a tough goal to achieve in New York; in fact, the Stephen Cohen Gallery is also announcing a new event competing with the AIPAD show or extending it (the Stephen Cohen Gallery is a member of AIPAD). After "Photo L.A." last January, "Photo San Francisco" next July. "Photo New York" is scheduled for next fall. 2004 also happens to be the 100th anniversary of Bill Brandt's birth. A new book of the British photographer's best images is being published in England by the Bill Brandt archive while Stanford University Press just released Bill Brandt, a Life by Paul Delany. Chair of the Department of English at Simon Fraser University (B.C.). AIPAD decided to honor the British photographer by reproducing one of his photographs on the cover of the catalogue of the show ("Doing the Lambeth Walk. 1939"): unfortunately, nothing else happened to support this gesture, no show, no lecture. MoMA is usually a block away, but due to renovations, it is currently stationed in Brooklyn until the re-opening of its Manhattan quarters next year. Its next show will be Ansel Adams at 100 by John Szarkowski! The Metropolitan did not, this year, repeat last year's initiative when the Thomas Struth retrospective not only coincided with the AIPAD show but was part of it. 2004 is a biennial year for the Whitney, whose programming has been somewhat flat for a while, lacking energy and innovative initiatives, especially in the department of photography: funds might be partly responsible for the current state of things. The Guggenheim seems to survive in the wake of its Matthew Barney show. The museum had nothing on show and looked almost more enticing with its momentary atmosphere of absence/extra-minimalist display and pervading longing for art. It had for a while given its power back to Wright's architectural genius after storing Barneyis cheap props (the museum may have had a different financial experience though), and pseudo-postmodern mental bric-a-brac. The exception these days seems to be the International Center of Photography. Under Brian Wallis's curatorial leadership, ICP has soared to new heights and its recent shows have established it as the most dynamic, and stimulating photographic institutions in the world. Hardly had their first triennial closed its door that Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self, the fruit of 4 years of intensive research and collaboration with Coco Fusco (collaboration is definitely a key ingredient in Wallis's working method) opened. Three other events seized the opportunity that the Photographic Show provided as it attracted photo aficionados from all around the country and beyond--although it seems that photo fairs as well as "Months of Photography"/biennials are spurting everywhere resulting in less travel. These events included: the Lotte Jacobi retrospective at the Jewish Museum uptown, the release of Richard Misrach's new work both on the cover and on the pages of Aperture's latest issue, and on the walls of the Pace/McGill gallery in Chelsea, and last, but nct least, the now-ritual auctions at Christie's and Swann's. One other show benefited from the AIPAD annual fair: Mark Osterman's wet collodion images in Confidence at the Howard Greenberg Gallery until March 13 (read interview in this issue of Afterimage, pp. …

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Mar 1, 2003

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 2004

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Sep 1, 2003

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Sep 1, 2004

When did you begin to create installations? When I was 6 or 7 years old, the street and sidewalk ... more When did you begin to create installations? When I was 6 or 7 years old, the street and sidewalk were my gallery. I made installations to display on the front steps to share with everyone who passed by, though I kept the one with urine specimens to myself (my father was a physician). I had excellent peripheral vision (lazy eye syndrome) and was instructed to practice seeing with a prism, to synthesize the two distinct, and different visual fields. When I was twelve, I collaborated with my father, who was also a Civil War buff, on making a battlefield diorama. He would capture our family in 3-D with a stereo camera and in film. I picked up imaging techniques from him. I enjoyed the ex-citement and shared viewing experience associated with movies and slide shows. We would pass around a lighted stereo viewer to look at the 3-D slides, whose dramatic layered space suggested an actual depth that made printed photographs look flat, compressed. He taught me to shoot movies and edit in the camera, which gave me a heightened awareness of space and time as well as an affinity for photography and innovative approaches. When I was enlisted in setting up the shots for his movies and stereo slides, it felt like making installations to me. Empty spaces have meaning for me. To me nothing is empty; gaps are stories. Space is full of stories of inclusion and exclusion. Things that are left out have always been important to me. The question I always ask is why. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I began making installations in the early '70s, as my shaped paintings extended into viewer space in a search for ways to eliminate the frame and illusion. I began making large geometric, sprayed lacquer corner pieces that existed in real space (the space of the viewer), involving the viewer in the process of visually deconstructing linear perspective [metonymic in my work for a default orthodox perspective, -Western science, -authority figure]. The viewer's movements, reversed perspective, and mirror finish suggested multiple contradictory interpretations, and contained a feminist subtext. Installation suggested a location to respond to the art historical bias against space, to the sexist, Western subtext privileging form over space (form = positive/male, space=negative/female). Lacking a male default point of view, installation could allow me to incorporate autobiographical material, develop a female subject position in real space where visual arts intersect with politics, science, technology, and life. Painting felt too well-behaved (like a box), sculpture seemed too fixed. Photography lets the viewer look through someone else's eyes. Installation was not default white male elitist art like painting and sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Interests in content, process, feminist art, conceptual art, and the role of the viewer, brought me back to making installations after a decade of painting. In the early 1980s, working in a large studio in downtown Washington D.C., I began working in real space with non-art materials, such as tar paper and screen. At the time, my paintings--as well as most of the art of museums--seemed too irrelevant, too class-based, too white. I was interested in power relations and public space, point of view and context, and searching for a tool for critiquing hierarchies, systems, orthodoxies, and scientific specialization. Installations put all boundaries into question, including public/private ones that silence minorities and women, and art/life divisions that kept viewers at a distance. As presentation installation art makes boundary crossing into ritual transgression, I wanted to work in the space of the viewer, to make art that existed in the space between life and art, a shared space that included the viewer and time. Installations affirm connections and public space, and are less hierarchical and distancing than painting or sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A response to Reagonomics, UnEmployment Division (1983) was an interactive performance installation in which viewers waited in line, answered questions, filled out forms, as they went from office to office (installation to installations) en route to a national homeless shelter, the "Classified Ad Lounge" (installation). …

Ciel variable : Art, photo, médias, culture, 2011

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Ciel variable : art, photo, médias, culture, 2011

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Ciel variable : Art, photo, médias, culture, 2012