Photography as Performance: A Conversation with John Schabel and Gary Schneider

This event was recorded. Please view the lecture here.

To mark the opening of the exhibition Analog Culture: Printer’s Proofs from the Schneider/Erdman Photography Lab, 1981–2001 (May 19–August 12, 2018), the Harvard Art Museums will present a conversation between artist John Schabel and printer and artist Gary Schneider. In the 1980s and ’90s, Schneider and his partner John Erdman operated a photography printing business in downtown Manhattan. Schabel was one of the many artists who came to Schneider to have his work printed. The two collaborated on many of Schabel’s most important works, and in the process developed a long-lasting working relationship based on a common understanding of photography’s technical and conceptual dimensions. Both shared the idea that photography involved a “performance”: for Schabel it was in the shooting of photographs; for Schneider it was in the printing of them. In addition to exploring Schabel and Schneider’s collaborations and working processes, this conversation considers how Schabel’s work offers a timely assessment of concepts of observation, surveillance, and privacy in a post-9/11 world.

Jennifer Quick, the exhibition’s curator and the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Associate Research Curator in Photography, will moderate the conversation.

The lecture will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway. Doors will open at 5:30pm.

Free admission, but limited seating is available. Tickets will be distributed beginning at 5:30pm at the Broadway entrance. One ticket per person.

Following the lecture, the Analog Culture exhibition will remain open until 8pm.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities.

Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.