Houston Center for Photography

Composition Crash Course
2019-09-21 12:00 - 18:00 UTC

Opening Reception: Hue and Saturate
2019-09-13 22:30 - 2019-09-14 01:00 | Houston Center for Photography
Please join Houston Center for Photography for the opening reception of Hue and Saturate, an exhibition of works by Daniel Gordon, on Friday, September 13, 2019 from 5:30-8pm. Curator remarks begin at 6pm.

Hue and Saturate brings together 11 works from New York-based artist, Daniel Gordon, for his first solo exhibition in Houston. Often described in the style of Matisse’s cut-outs or Cezanne’s still lifes, Gordon’s work uses shape, color, and size to playfully disrupt our ideas about medium-specificity, artifice, and photography in the age of the internet. Born in 1980, Gordon is squarely positioned in a pre and post-internet world. His tableaus break down classical objects found in still lifes into constructed forms and in some cases trace references, shadows, and pixels of flora, fauna, produce, and tableware. This emphasis on the digital construction of the image has a hide-and-seek characteristic throughout this show, alternating between explicitly revealing itself and tucking itself into painterly compositions of paper objects. While Matisse or Cezanne’s work might refer more to the shift from objective to subjective perception through the construction of the painted form, Gordon’s use of pattern, repetition and digital imaging illustrates the deconstruction and reconstitution of form from one reality or plane to another.
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Out of the Box: Using Your Digital Camera
2019-09-13 14:00 - 17:00, 2019-06-27 18:00 - 21:00

Printing Your Photographs
2019-09-09 00:00 - 2019-09-24 21:38

Photography I
2019-08-29 18:00 - 21:00, 2019-08-15 10:00 - 13:00, 2019-07-09 18:00 - 21:00, 2019-05-14 18:00 - 21:00

Camera Basics
2019-08-24 12:00 - 18:00, 2019-07-13 12:00 - 18:00, 2019-06-08 12:00 - 18:00

Lightroom Classic CC
2019-08-22 19:00 - 21:00

Photoshop I
2019-08-13 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-05-22 18:30 - 21:00

Seminar: Developing Your Photographic Voice
2019-08-13 10:00 - 13:00, 2019-05-15 18:00 - 21:00

Photography II
2019-08-12 18:00 - 21:00, 2019-05-23 18:00 - 21:00

2019 Center Annual Profound Movement Opening Reception
2019-07-19 17:30 - 20:00 | Houston Center for Photography
Join Houston Center for Photography for this year’s Center Annual Exhibition, juried by Shane Lavalette, Director of Lightwork.
The Center Annual is Houston Center for Photography’s yearly group exhibition that seeks to highlight and provide insight into current themes, technologies, and practices in photography. The show features a diverse array of works from members of our global photography community and is selected by a leading curator, editor, or artist. This annual exhibition opens our galleries to photographers from anywhere in the world, whether emerging, mid-career, or established, and as such, aims to provide viewers with critical insight into our current moment—both within the field of photography and within society at large. Shane Lavalette, director of Light Work, selected 38 artists out of over 200 entries from around the globe.
Of those selected, three artists will receive the Beth Block Center Annual Honoraria, generously supported by The Beth Block Foundation. Deanna Pizzitelli, Samantha Box, and Zora Murff will receive $1,000 each, and will be featured in the Fall 2019 issue of spot magazine.
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Studio Lighting: Still Life & Product
2019-07-15 18:00 - 21:00

Visual Storytelling
2019-07-08 18:00 - 21:00

Natural Light Portraiture
2019-06-25 18:00 - 21:00

Possible Selves: A Lecture by Horace Ballard
2019-06-18 19:00 - 20:00 | Houston Center for Photography
Houston Center for Photography is pleased to present a lecture by Williams College Museum of Art curator, Horace Ballard, on the Museum’s exhibition possible selves: queer foto vernaculars. Ballard will speak about the curation of the exhibition and the global impact of queer identities on the evolution of portrait photography. The works exhibited in possible selves span over 60 years of photographic history and include artists such as Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, and Lorna Simpson, along with over 200 images from social media. By linking the fine art photograph with the social media snapshot, possible selves emphasizes the ways in which queer communities are created through visual technologies and how photography has been used to interrogate normative and non-normative identities since the beginning of the medium.
This lecture is part of a city-wide initiative to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which paved the way for the gay liberation movement and the contemporary fight for LGBTQIA rights in America.
This lecture is part of Houston Center for Photography’s ongoing series, Words & Pictures, a lecture and conversation series between photographers, writers, and thinkers of the medium.
About Horace Ballard
Curator of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art

Ballard specializes in American art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He is particularly interested in the history of photography, ideologies of Romanticism, gender in early-American portraiture, the visual culture(s) of war, and the formulation of queer canons across the history of art. He received a Ph.D. from Brown University and is currently preparing a book manuscript, entitled, “The Re-construction of Beauty: Photography, Whiteness, and US Masculinity, 1865-1900.” He has held prior positions at the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); the Yale University Art Gallery; the Birmingham Museum of Art; and Monticello/Thomas Jefferson Foundation. He also serves as a freelance writer and consultant on the black radical tradition and post-black art practices, writing and editing for the Smithsonian; the Vera List Center of Art and Politics at the New School; the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore.

Photoshop Crash Course
2019-06-15 12:00 - 15:00

Travel Photography
2019-06-11 18:00 - 21:00

Birds and Nature Photography
2019-05-16 18:00 - 21:00

Opening Reception: 2019 Fellowship Awards
2019-05-10 17:30 - 20:00 | Houston Center for Photography
Carol Crow Fellowship Award Recipient: Cristina Velasquez
El Nuevo Mundo / The New World

© Cristina Velasquez
“The New World,” as a designation for the Americas, originated in sixteenth-century Europe during the so-called age of discovery. Four centuries later, the term still evokes a combination of idealistic optimism and strategic exploitation. Cristina Velasquez questions this legacy from the perspective of her native Colombia. Deploying the concept of mestizaje, or the mixing of different ethnicities and cultures, Velasquez combines photography (a new medium) with weaving (an ancient method). Neither is privileged: weaving lends texture and dimension to photography, and photography adds representational detail to weaving. Velasquez produces objects that are overtly manual in origin, asking the viewer to think about labor—her own, and also that of Latin American people across the history of colonialism—as her true subject. Rather than illustrating working bodies in a conventionally documentary way, Velasquez frequently depicts isolated limbs in stylized, almost sculptural arrangements. These photographs are collaborative stagings of bodies in landscapes. In another form of mestizaje, they blend categories of genre and tone. Serious in intent and exacting in terms of craftsmanship, Velasquez’s “New World” is also animated by a sense of absurdity and joyous color. The artist’s approach is not didactic or propagandistic, but delivers its social and historic message via performance, engaging the viewer in the game of questioning, revision, and revelation.
–Juror, Britt Salvesen

HCP Fellowship Award Recipient: Zhao Qian
A Field Guide
Zhao Qian

The long-haul airplane flight is Zhao Qian’s metaphor for the associative, introspective, disorienting images in “A Field Guide.” When one is in an extended state of limbo, one casts about for visual stimulation, whether out the window or among the corporate entertainments offered by the airline. The spatial displacement mapped by Zhao’s San Francisco-to-Shanghai flight is also a cultural one that he experiences as a resident of both cities. The specificity of national identity is elided in non-sites such as airports, where all design decisions—from wayfinding signage to furniture to advertisements—are driven by maximum legibility and functionality. Within those leveling conditions, Zhao’s observational sensibility has the vibrancy and idiosyncrasy of a lucid dream. Scale shifts, odd juxtapositions, aggressive colors, and video sequences all contribute to an immersive effect that translates the montage strategies of surrealism and postmodernism into our fully digital present. Confronting the flattening tendencies of screen-culture—in which complex real-world objects, places, and emotions are dispersed into arrays of pixels—Zhao responds by mapping this flatness onto the dimensionality of a gallery or exhibition space. His open-ended Field Guide has infinite configurations. In that sense, it is not definitive in the traditional manner of the “field guide” format, which is intended to help the reader to identify flora, fauna, or other things in their natural environment. Instead, Zhao Qian’s work makes us wonder if contemporary image culture is now in fact our natural environment. In that new reality, the artist’s roving attention finds moments of individual meaning amidst the esperanto of global capitalism.
–Juror, Britt Salvesen

Opening Reception: Elbert Howze Motherward, 1985
2019-05-10 17:30 - 20:00 | Houston Center for Photography
Elbert (Ed) Howze (1951 – 2015) was born in Detroit, Michigan on Valentine’s Day in 1951. When he was eighteen, he joined the United States Army and served in Vietnam, sustaining permanent serious injuries that impacted his health for the rest of his life. He came to Houston in 1973 and continued his education at the University of Houston, receiving a BFA in Fine Art, a BS in Technology and Business Technology, and an MFA in Photography, studying under George Krause. In 1990, he was a Houston Center for Photography Fellowship winner, selected by Keith Carter, Bill Frazier, and Jean Caslin.
Howze’s work came to Houston Center for Photography by way of his wife, Mrs. Barbara Howze, who soon after his death in 2015, brought a portfolio case and several carefully-labeled boxes of photographs and drawings to the gallery at his bequest. Amidst hundreds of images of Houston and various veteran parades, war demonstrations, and travels around the country, was a spiral-bound maquette of a photobook titled, Fourth Ward. In other iterations in his archive he titles the work, Motherward, which is where this exhibition gets its title. The book consists of black and white and color portraits made in 1985 of residents of Houston’s Fourth Ward, Freedmen’s Town, an area he describes in an opening essay as “a place of neglect and decay, which appears to be deliberate by plan.” As he informs us in this opening essay, the work is not about the physical place of the Fourth Ward; it’s about the spirit and persistence of its residents.
Newspaper clippings from the summer of 1984 were tucked away in his portfolios, each describing the “battle brewing” over the neighborhood’s future, its historic brick streets, and its appeal for historic recognition. While his landscapes and environmental depictions of the neighborhood were made over a much longer period of time, Howze made the majority of the portraits in Motherward in 1985, collecting signed and dated model releases from most individuals. These releases identify each sitter with their name as well as their occupation, ultimately assembling them into a community, not of properties or streets, but of people. Motherward asks us then, not what or where but who is Fourth Ward, whose is she, and what story is she allowed to tell? This willful gesture to humanize the residents in the face of gentrification has become an important and prescient act of preservation for a neighborhood that is still fighting to hold onto its history.
With immense gratitude to Mrs. Barbara Howze and special thanks to Danielle Burns Wilson, Curator and Manager at the African American Library at the Gregory School, and Erika Thompson, Community Liaison at the African American Library at the Gregory School. Houston Center for Photography and Mrs. Barbara Howze will donate the work to the African American Library at the Gregory School after this exhibition, which is a place in the Fourth Ward that Howze often photographed.
–Ashlyn Davis, Executive Director & Curator
