The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2008
Britt Salvesen and the CCP
by Margaret ReganBritt Salvesen is back in her office at the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, after a one-month writers’ residency at Lake Como in northern Italy.
“There were a lot of temptations,” admits Salvesen, the newly appointed director of the Center. “But I did get a lot of writing done!”
In between scholarly debates and jaunts to the “charming village” of Bellagio, where she merged her Spanish and French to “stumble along in Romance language,” Salvesen focused on photography. She had a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work for a month in the company of some 20 other international scholars, all of them lodged in the lakeside digs.
They convened for meals — “We had breakfast together, and lunch together or a bag lunch in our rooms, and dinner together” — and then retired to private studies. “We had big chunks of time to work.”
Chunks of time are exactly what the busy Salvesen needs. As of last spring she’s both director and curator of the Center. Among her many other tasks, she’s deep into planning for a major exhibition this winter, and she’s writing an essay for the accompanying catalog.
That show, New Topographics, will take a fresh look at a group of influential landscape photographers who first exhibited together in 1975. Young renegades in their 20s, they pioneered landscapes that were neither pristine nor pretty. One of them was Frank Gohlke, now laureate professor of photography at the UA and a senior research fellow at the Center.
“They looked at developed landscapes common in the West,” Salvesen explains, with their photos picturing such unphotogenic subjects as Albuquerque sprawling toward the mountains and Denver exploding across the prairie.
“They’re photographs of a man-altered landscape that contrast with an Ansel Adams view of nature.”
As it happens, Salvesen’s campus office is steps away from some of those impossibly famous Adams landscapes. Adams helped found the now-renowned Center for Creative Photography at the UA in 1975, and his masterworks, like Moonrise over New Mexico and El Capitan, Sunrise, are highlights of the collection.
The new show, Salvesen hopes, will connect the Adams brand of pristine photography with “what’s happening now in landscape.” And the Topographic photographers “will help us reach a younger audience. Their work is a bridge to contemporary practice.” The Center is uniquely positioned to make such connections. Its 80,0000 photographs include some of the best-known images of the 20th century, from such luminaries as Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Lola Alvarez Bravo, and W. Eugene Smith. Added to this treasure-trove are thousands of archival materials — everything from photographic proofs and letters to diaries and cameras. “We’re the premiere resource for understanding not just the history of photography but the photographic process and creation,” Salvesen says. Researchers and visitors can see the “trial-and-error aspect of photographic prints. We have 80,000 finished products and we also have an array of other objects around the finished product.”
When visitors see Adams’ typewriters and camera, they “get a sense of the person, the hands-on aspect of making photographs. What it means to have a life in photography.”
Like every other arts administrator fretting over the graying of arts audiences, Salvesen is plotting how to reel in young patrons. And she may be just the person to get the job done.
For one thing, she plays against type. At 40, she’s young to hold the post (founding director Harold Jones beats her out as youngest — he was just 36 when he started in 1975). But she is the first woman director in the Center’s 33-year-history, and she’s conscious of the honor.
“This is a really great time for the field of photographic studies,” she says happily, “A lot of major photographic museums were founded in the 70s, and they’ve been headed by the same people ever since.
“We’re seeing generational change. We’ve been mentored by them. Young people are coming up. A lot of us are women.”
Salvesen holds one of the most enviable positions in the field of photography, but she didn’t even get interested in the medium until she was in grad school.
“There was just a passing reference to photography in my undergrad major in art history,” she remembers.
A native of Wisconsin, she moved with her family to Texas at the age of 17. She started out as a Spanish major at Trinity University in San Antonio, but during a junior year abroad in Madrid she fell in love with painting at the Prado, the grand repository of such masters as Velásquez, Goya, and El Greco. When she got back to Trinity, she added an art history major, and after graduation headed off to London to earn a master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Photography was only peripherally on her mind.
“My thesis was on painting. But I had an internship at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They set me to cataloging 19th-century photographs. And they had two great photo curators there.”
Until then, “Photography hadn’t occurred to me as a field.”
Salvesen was mesmerized by the master photos she held in her own hands, and that hands-on contact changed the direction of her career. Back in the U.S., she immersed herself in the history of photography for her doctorate in art history at the University of Chicago. The field was in its infancy.
“It was uncharted territory, and it emerged as a possibility for a dissertation subject.”
She ended up researching 19th-century stereoscopes, that peculiar 19th-century invention that allowed people to see 3-D images through viewfinders. During grad school, as she wrote her thesis, she worked at the Art Institute of Chicago. After getting her Ph.D., she hired on full time, as an editor of scholarly publications.
“I loved it. I worked with curators, mostly in 19th-century painting. I got to see what a curator does, beyond the glamorous. I learned about teamwork, and it made me sensitive to deadlines.”
Her next job, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, was “30 minutes from my childhood home. It’s the museum I visited as a child.” Perhaps more importantly, in Milwaukee she moved back to photography, as associate curator of “all works on paper, prints, drawings, and photographs.”
In her less than two years there, Salvesen curated four shows, and coordinated a fifth. Significantly, three showcased photographs: Danny Lyons’ bike-rider images, works by Bill Brandt and Weston, and a Super Hits of the 70s exhibition, drawn from Milwaukee’s own collection.”
Then in 2004, the Center’s director, Doug Nickel, came calling. The Center was just emerging from a tumultuous period that had left it without a director for three years, and without a curator for two. Hired in 2003, Nickel was rebuilding and on the lookout for fresh talent. He had read Salvesen’s dissertation on stereoscopes and found it brilliant.
“He made a great case for this institution,” Salvesen recalls. “This job brought me back around to photography.”
Salvesen is delighted that her new museum is part of a university.
Given her own transforming experience at the Victoria and Albert — holding master photos in her own hands — “I’m a big believer in bringing students into contact with objects,” she says. “It’s what sparks their interest. It’s what I like about being on campus.”
UA students, like alumni and members of the general public, can make appointments to see particular archives in the Center’s viewing rooms. Wearing protective gloves, they can hold in their own hands an Adams Moonrise. Students routinely come to the Center for its exhibitions and visiting artists’ lectures, and art students get valuable work experience by interning there. “This campus offers good opportunities,” Salvesen says.
She’s been as busy at the Center as she was in Milwaukee. Since arriving in 2004, she has curated or co-curated or coordinated at least 10 exhibitions, from the lively On the Street: The New York School of Photographers to the scholarly Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work. Salvesen wrote the Callahan catalog, published by Yale, and sent it off as a traveling exhibition to her old stomping grounds at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The fall show, through November 2, is a retrospective for Gohlke, the UA prof who was one of the young rebels in the Topographic movement 30 years ago.
“He’s incredibly well-read and visually sensitive,” says Salvesen. Gohlke, she notes, has shot grain elevators in the Midwest, Mount St. Helens after the eruption, and the impact of a tornado on his hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas. “He did photographs in the immediate aftermath of the tornado, and went back a year later to see how the people responded. (In his photos) nature is always going to win.”
Plus, in a boon for students, Gohlke and Salvesen are co-teaching a “landscape photo seminar while his show is up. This is exactly the kind of thing we want to do here,” she adds. “We want an open door” between the UA art department and the Center. That scholarly collegiality was a top priority for Nickel, and it is for Salvesen as well. “I’m very inspired by Doug’s vision,” she says. Still, she has plans of her own.
The Center’s new conservation lab needs staff, and she’s committed to hiring a conservator. She intends to bring the collection more into the public eye, through on-line access, real-world publications, and traveling exhibitions. And she wants to add to it, by persuading today’s artists to donate their own materials when the time comes. “We need to keep our archive alive and active, make younger artists aware of it.”
She’d like to bring the new generation of photographers “to co-curate shows, or to show their work alongside one of our archive artists. Bring the artist here to meet the students, give a lecture. You never know what artists will see in a collection. It shakes things up.”
Meantime, she says, only half-joking, she hopes she can enlist some curatorial help, so it’s “not just me, show after show.” She pauses, but just for a second.
“I have a lot of projects under way,” she says with a smile. “It’s like a candy store. I could never come to the end of what this place offers.”
Back to Fall 2008 contents page