Alison Rossiter

Artist lecture Thursday, October 29, 2015 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth St., San Francisco, CA 94107
Haloid Military, expired October 1957, processed 2015, 2015

Alison Rossiter takes a minimalist approach to creating her photographs. She does not use a camera or film, nor does she use light. Since 2007, she has processed sheets of expired gelatin silver paper in photographic chemicals in the darkroom. Her work begins with collecting packages of commercially manufactured papers dating from 1900 onward, with a few rare examples from the nineteenth century, and is completed by the simple acts of immersing or dipping a sheet of paper in developer, or of pouring or pooling the developer on the sheet, followed by stopping and fixing the print. She refers to her work in terms of “latent images,” which have already been more or less fully formed by use or neglect and must simply be developed and fixed, and “processing experiments,” which require more intervention to create images. Rossiter achieves a rich array of results, with some works suggesting the faint impressions of primitive mark-making, others resembling landscapes, and still others calling to mind mid-twentieth-century painterly abstractions. Through the fundamentals of analog photography, she develops a dialogue between technology, process, the history of the medium and simple, raw materials.

Rossiter studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Banff Centre School of Fine Arts. Her photographs have been collected by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. Most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Navesink, New Jersey, and Manhattan.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.