Defining Moments — Susan Copen Oken. Published by Brilliant.
Richard Avedon wrote, “Susan is the most important lesser-known photographer of her generation.” Speaking about a student of his, Avedon shone light on the photographic practice of a photographer and artist whose book includes a singular portrait of Richard Avedon in bed, and bodies of work on an elderly friend of hers, Stanley; children’s beauty pageants; dog-show dogs and their owners; and service monkeys. The book also includes a handful of other types of images, but perhaps the most revealing for me were the sensitive and intimate portraits of Stanley, including a handful of nudes of his aged body reflecting decades of life and change. Susan Copen Oken’s work was new to me, and I was grateful for this book as an introduction to her practice.
Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. She has curated fifty exhibitions, including her recent Richard Avedon: Relationships, which was shown in Milan and Palermo, Italy, and Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, and has contributed chapters, interviews, and essays to over a dozen publications.
In 2021, based on her successful proposal, the Center for Creative Photography was awarded a significant grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to produce a book and exhibition celebrating the Chicano photographer Louis Carlos Bernal. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and in 2020 released a book on Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, co-published by the CCP and Yale University Press, now in a second printing.
RebeccaSenf.com
Instagram: @beckysenfccp