NON-PROFIT SPOTLIGHT

A Wide-Angle View of Photography: From regional to international, traditional to cutting edge, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP) maintains its balance

BY THOMAS GEARTY | MARCH 21, 2006

Imagine that you are the head of an institution dedicated to “contemporary photography,” responsible for making sense of all of the trends and movements currently clamoring for a place under that umbrella. Pretend also that you must make a place for the work of artists in your region while avoiding easy dismissal as just another regional museum. On top of that, imagine that you are also charged with serving students and faculty for one of the largest photography departments around, just down the street from one of the most highly regarded large museums in America.

If all that seems a bit daunting, welcome to the busy world of Rod Slemmons, director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP). But a talk with Slemmons—and a close look at the museum’s collections, exhibitions and other programs—quickly reveals that the museum and its staff are nimbly handling these challenges across the board.

The MOCP was established in 1984 by Columbia College, a nearly 10,000-student private arts and media college in downtown Chicago. As with many academic museums, the college provides all the museum’s facilities and most of its annual operating budget, while students from the Columbia get the chance to work in the museum and several of the museum staff teach photography courses on a regular basis.

But unlike most college museums, MOCP is probably better known than its parent institution. Tucked away on the first floor of the photo department on Michigan Avenue near the Art Institute, the little museum has developed an outsized reputation for innovative curating and a broad approach to defining the medium.

 “We have a real wide-angle view of photography. It goes all the way from video to performance art records to sculpture that incorporates photographs to regular photographs on the wall in frames,” says Slemmons (a former national chair of the Society for Photographic Education). “Essentially we’re more interested in artists who are using photography than we are in the older notion of ‘photographers who make art.’” For example, MOCP received broad critical attention for a 2004 show that examined the relationship between still photography and performance art, while this spring’s major exhibition, “Anticipation,” features time-based video work. At the same time, Slemmons is careful to point out that MOCP continually puts on shows of traditional photography, such as a retrospective of a Chicago commercial photographer Victor Skrebneski, Taryn Simon’s “The Innocents” portraits, or this summer’s upcoming André Kertész exhibit.

MOCP is also home to a strong collection of nearly 8,000 works with a significant emphasis on American and US resident photography from 1936 to the present. The museum complements its permanent collection with the Midwestern Photographers Project (MPP). Started in 1984, the MPP is a rotating archive of work by artists from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

“It’s a way to support the photographers of the region without—and we emphasize this—without implying that there is a regional vision, a regional photography,” says Slemmons.

Each photographer loans the museum up to 15 works for at least two years. This work is then available for viewing by scholars, curators, dealers, collectors and anyone else who wants to get a sense of current work from the Midwest. Its chief advantage is that the work is not locked away in a vault, says Slemmons. “They’re available in the print study room. Virtually anybody can come in here and look at them.”

And curators and dealers do come to look. Over the past two decades, MOCP has established a reputation as a place that identifies important and interesting work. “In the past few years, we’ve been really savvy at spotting people who are on an upward trajectory,” says Slemmons. “They’re shown here, and the next year they’re in the Whitney Biennial.”

That national attention is a big return on Columbia College’s investment in supporting the museum.  But just as important to the college is the fact that directly across from the photo department elevators is the front door to a cutting-edge museum—the faculty and students don’t have far to go to tap into the expertise of Slemmons and his staff.

At 750 declared undergraduate majors, the Columbia College photography department is one of the largest around. Add 20 or so graduate students, a dozen full-time faculty and 70 part-time instructors, and there’s quite a large built-in audience sitting right on top of the museum.

“We need things like the Museum of Contemporary Photography to be a resource for us because we have so many students,” says Bill Frederking, acting chair of the photography program at Columbia.

Frederking said instructors regularly take advantage of the exhibitions and the print viewing room for their classes. “The museum staff is great. You can just call them up and they’ll pull work,” he says.

The MOCP print viewing room is in regular use, from both students and faculty at Columbia to outside groups. Instructors regularly arrange for the museum staff to show students original work from both the permanent collection and the Midwestern Photographers Project. “Someone will come in and say, ‘We are interested in portraiture’ or whatever the theme may be,” says Corinne Rose, MOCP manager of education, “and we will pull work specifically for that group to see and lead them in a discussion on the ideas and techniques informing the work.”

The museum also has public lectures, visiting artists and educational outreach programs like Picture Me, an after-school program for Chicago public school students.

“Our main function is education,” says Rose. “We’re very democratic about sharing our resources and programming. That’s important to us.”

Frederking says he believes most students tend to enter Columbia College thinking about a career as a professionally oriented photographer, but by their junior or senior years, many of them are considering a career as a fine artist. “Over the time that they’re here in the department, they start to see the possibility of using photography in different ways,” he says.

Frederking credits MOCP with helping his students to see the breadth of photography’s expressive potential. After 23 years with Columbia College, Frederking says, “I still think there is a core group of photographers in the department that are straight photographers and that documentary has a long tradition in the department, but now we also have students who are doing installation work and doing fabricated things.”

That adaptability suits Slemmons just fine. “The nice thing about this place is that we’re small enough to be pretty light on our feet,” he says.

Columbia College: www.colum.edu

Thomas Gearty was the founding editor of TeachingPhoto.com. Since receiving an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1999, he has taught photography at both Mass Art and the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. In addition, he has been a major contributor to two major textbooks on the medium: Photography, a comprehensive curriculum with Henry Horenstein and Russell Hart, and Black-and-White Photography: A Basic Manual, the third edition of Horenstein's classic instructional text. In 2001, Gearty was one of 80 emerging artists selected from around the world for the Sotheby's Artlink program. To view his work, please visit www.thomasgearty.com.