Artist Talks at Moore College of Art & Design
Sponsored by Moore College and Aperturent
The Printed Landscape
In an era dominated by digital images, the photographic print and the photobook remain among photography's most enduring and expressive artistic forms. Join internationally acclaimed photographers Andrea Modica, Ron Tarver, and Richard Boutwell for an engaging discussion moderated by renowned photography critic, curator, publisher, and collector Stephen Perloff as they examine the creative journey from image-making to the finished print and published book. Working across platinum-palladium printing, historic photographic processes, documentary photography, and contemporary fine-art publishing, these artists demonstrate how craftsmanship, sequencing, materiality, and design shape the viewer's experience. From Modica's exquisitely crafted platinum-palladium prints and celebrated monographs, to Tarver's award-winning documentary project The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America, to Boutwell's innovative integration of traditional printmaking with twenty-first-century technologies, each artist offers a unique perspective on transforming photographs into lasting physical objects. Together with Perloff—whose decades of leadership through The Photo Review, The Photograph Collector, and numerous landmark exhibitions have helped shape the field—they will explore the evolving role of fine printing, book publishing, collecting, and craftsmanship in contemporary photography, offering valuable insights for photographers, publishers, collectors, and anyone passionate about the future of the photographic image.
Moderator
Stephen Perloff
Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review, a critical journal of international scope publishing since 1976, and editor of The Photograph Collector, the leading source of information on the photography art market. He is also the editor of The Daguerreian Society Quarterly and The Daguerreian Annual. He has taught photography and the history of photography at numerous Philadelphia-area colleges and universities and has been the recipient of two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for arts criticism. He was the recipient of the Sol Mednick Award for 2000 from the Mid-Atlantic region of the Society for Photographic Education, the first annual Vanguard Award from the Philadelphia Center for the Photographic Image in 2007, and the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2012.
His photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions and reside in many museum and private collections, including those of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, Lehigh University, Haverford College, and the University of North Dakota. His exhibition, Unseen Color, Part I, was shown at The Light Room Gallery, Philadelphia, in March and April 2012; and Unseen Color, Part II: East and West was on view at The Light Room in May and June 2013. His work was recently included in the exhibitions An Evolving Legacy: Twenty Years of Collecting at the Michener Art Museum at the James A. Michener Art Museum (June 2009 – January 2010); Streets of Philadelphia: Photography 1970–1985 at The Print Center, Philadelphia (fall 2009 and on view October – November 2016 at the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association, Vilnius, Lithuania); The Silver Garden at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (February–July 2005); Continuum: Photography in Philadelphia: Past, Present, and Future at the Free Library of Philadelphia (March–July 2007); Filling the Frame at Photo West Gallery, Philadelphia (April 2007), and Hot Topic, a show about global warming, at The Germantown Academy (fall 2007). His work was included in the exhibition Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image at the James A. Michener Art Museum (November 3, 2012 – March 31, 2013), and images from Unseen Color were shown at the InVision Photography Festival in Bethlehem, PA, from October 2012 to January 2013. In 2013 his work was seen at the State Theater in Easton, PA (February–March) and at the Red Filter Gallery in Lambertville, NJ (March–April). West Philly Days, an exhibition of images made between 1967 and 1976, was shown in West Philadelphia at The Gold Standard in September–October 2014. In 2018 his work was included in cit.i.zen.ship: reflection on rights at the Department of Photography & Imaging at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in collaboration with For Freedoms’ Fifty States Initiative. His work was included in the exhibition Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley at the Michener Art Museum, February 4 – August 15, 2021. Two of his early street photographs were included in Eyes on Main Street in Wilson, NC, one in the 2021 and one in the 2023 festival. And three of his images were included in Picturing Resistance at Art Intersection in Gilbert, AZ, in September 2022.
His book North Dakota was published by wilburerditions in April 2016. An exhibition of this work was held at Santa Bannon Fine Art in Bethlehem, PA, during the InVision Photography Festival in November 2016, and at CameraWork Gallery in Scranton, PA, in June 2017. North Dakota — and Other Landscapes was shown at the May Gallery of Webster University in St. Louis in November 2019. And several images from North Dakota were exhibited at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, NY, in 2021.
He has been widely praised for his writing about the photography art market, including his detailed auction reports, and for his extensive reporting on major stories like the exposure of the production of fraudulent Lewis Hine prints. His articles have been reproduced in dozens of other journals — like American Photo, The Art Newspaper, Town & Country,Silvershotz, Photo News, Camera, and the website Le Journal de la Photographie — and he has been called on as an expert to comment on the state of the photography market for publications such as The New York Times, The Toronto Globe & Mail, The Wall Street Journal, Photo District News, and the New York Observer. He has also written several essays and introductions for books, including for the 2012 Leica Oskar Barnack award winner Frank Hallam Day’sNocturnal and Feo Pitcairn’s Primordial Landscapes (2015). He is a long-time member of the Board of Artistic Advisers of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) in Philadelphia and also served for a number of years as a member of CFEVA’s Board of Directors. He recently finished two terms on the Board of Directors of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia.
He has curated more than a score of exhibitions, including Philadelphia Past and Present at the Philadelphia Art Alliance for the city's tricentennial in 1982. He was the curator of the acclaimed series Photography: Contemporary Prospect at Historic Yellow Springs (1994–2001). And he curated the exhibition Camera Work: A Centennial Celebration, which opened at the James A. Michener Art Museum in September 2003 and traveled nationally through January 2005; an exhibition of environmentally concerned photographs, Paradise Paved, for the Painted Bride Art Center (April–May 2005); Radical Vision: The Revolution in American Photography, 1945–1980 at the James A. Michener Art Museum (January–May 2006); the retrospective exhibition Andrea Baldeck: The Heart of the Matter at the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia (January–March 2007); and Saving Face, an exhibition of portraits drawn from the collection of Robert Infarinato at the Michener (November 2008 – March 2009). He was also the curator for the Woodmere Art Museum Photography Triennial (September 2009 – January 2010) and Mark Sadan: Shadows of Delight at the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust and Galleries on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom. Extended Realities: The Language of Photomontagewas seen at the Rowan University Art Gallery from October to November, 2013. His most recent curatorial project, 9 New Jersey Photographers, was exhibited at Stockton University from January – March 2018. He also has served as a juror for literally scores of competitions, locally, nationally, and internationally and has served as a portfolio reviewer at numerous photography festivals like FotoFest, Photo Lucida, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Panorama, and for several regional and national conferences of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE).
He also oversaw the publication of Bill Armstrong’s book Quarantine: Artists and Writers on Isolation in 2020.
Artists
Richard Boutwell
Richard Boutwell, originally from Joshua Tree, California, is a photographer and print-maker based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His work is based around aspects of archaeology, family history and myth, and the influence of spirituality, technology, and social media on how we interact with the natural environment. Through it, he examines his personal connection to the greater cultural, industrial, and environmental history of the landscape—mostly involving issues of water rights and the impact of recreation in the desert landscapes of the Southwest. In addition to his traditional landscape photography, he is now combining his photographs with 3D scans of the environment, found objects, historical materials, and appropriated mapping and scientific data.
Boutwell began photographing in college in the year 2000 while studying music and pursuing a career as a jazz bassist. Shortly into his first darkroom course and being exposed to the beauty and creative possibilities of fine-art photographs, he dropped all his music classes and devoted himself to studying the history and craft of photography. Instead of pursuing a formal fine-arts degree, he relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to enter an intensive long-term apprenticeship with the photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee. He worked as their darkroom, studio, and field assistant from 2002 until 2008, and then became their full-time printer and ran the scanning and digital studio at their photography book publishing company, Lodima Press, until 2015.
In balance with his family life and fine-art practice, he teaches photography and fine-art printing privately through https:/www.bwmastery.com. Boutwell also created specialized software that helped advance the craft of digital black-and-white and historic-process printing now used by photographers worldwide.
His photographs have been included in national and international group exhibitions and are in private and public collections. He has served as a guest lecturer on the history of landscape photography at mid-Atlantic colleges and universities.
Ron Tarver
Acclaimed photographer and Swarthmore College art professor Ron Tarver corrects the American cowboy narrative with The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024). From ranches to city streets, Tarver’s photographs reveal the beauty, romance, and visual poetry of Black cowboys throughout the country.
In The Long Ride Home, Tarver illuminates the enduring heritage of Black cowboys through 110 photos made in the early '90s, at the start of this 30-year (ongoing) project. Pictured are cowboys and cowgirls of all ages, Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, urban cowboys, and retired cowhands. In addition, Art T. Burton, a distinguished historian, author, and expert on Black cowboys, provides a comprehensive essay on the icons who shaped America.
Tarver, a Pulitzer Prize-, Pew Fellowship-, and Guggenheim Fellowship-winning photographer is a natural pioneer of contemporary Black cowboy photography. Growing up in Fort Gibson, Okla., with Black cowboys as an ordinary part of his life, he rode horses, went to rodeos, spent summer days on his cousin's ranch, or working on local farms. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, was an avid photographer who documented the local Black community, teaching Tarver how to do the same.
When Tarver moved to Philadelphia in 1983, he was surprised by how uninformed people were about Black cowboys. The revelation spurred his dedication to photographing of Black cowboys, including on assignments for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Tarver’s retrospective arrives right on time, showcasing the trailblazers who are bringing wider recognition to Black cowboys for their vital role in American history and contemporary culture. Across music, fashion, and film, works centering Black cowboy culture — such as Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter (2024), Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton American Western FW24 Collection, David Oyelowo's Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023), Tanner Adell’s Buckle Bunny (2023), Jordan Peele's Nope (2022), Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021), and Lil Nas X’s time-travel western Old Town Road (2019) — have reached indelible success.
The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is now available for pre-order from Amazon and GFT Publishing, and will be released on September 7, 2024. In celebration of The Long Ride Home’s release, 40 large format prints will travel the states in an exhibition sponsored by The Print Center in Philadelphia.
Andrea Modica
Andrea Modica lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar.
Her books includeTreadwell (Chronicle Books),Barbara (Nazraeli),Minor League (Smithsonian Press),Human Being (Nazraeli),Fountain (Stinehour Editions), L’Amico del Cuore (Nazraeli), As We Wait (L’Artiere Editions), January 1 (L’Artiere Editions), Lentini (Kris Graves Projects) Reveal (Yoffy Press), 2020 (TIS Books),Theatrum Equorum (TIS Books), Catholic Girl (L’Artiere Editions) and Italian Story (L’Artiere Editions).
Modica’s solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the ICP, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.