Creative Campus Initiative visit from photographer Morgan Maben
As Morgan spoke, I found myself using self-awareness to reflect upon the rest of the class, learning what I had dedicated 4 years to. Additionally, both my professor at Wesleyan and my teacher, Irina Rozovsky, have positionalities connected to the assigned reading, Is it Soap Opera or Real Life…? (Griffin 2020), as Russian-American photographers with an interest in fiction-documentary photo practices. I met Irina the summer of 2024 in the south of France during her and her husband, photographer Mark Steinmetz’s workshop, the Humid. Her photo books had kept me company ever since. While I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the next summer, I read her book, In Plain Air. She states, “I see Prospect Park as a kind of gritty paradise where a complex social reality is played out upon a shared, historic stage. As American esteem and spirit are put to a test, the images in this series hope to contemplate and reaffirm our sense of a common, living place and time” (https://phmuseum.com/projects/in-plain-air). As I was living off a limited Wesleyan Summer Grant for 3 months, I was in desperate need of a democratic environment for all classes. Prospect Park provided that, in an otherwise very urban environment, different from my rural Iowan upbringing.
Morgan’s work, as she had received a similar Wesleyan photography education, interested me. It felt both familiar and different: familiar through shared institutional influences, but also challenging in the way her art was very different from mine. Morgan questions the boundaries between reality and constructed narrative, whereas I question modes of perception of reality. I wonder if this difference is generational or cultural, as her upbringing was much different from mine. Another one of Irina Rozovsky’s books, Insieme, shows photographs that she and her husband took while raising her daughter, Amelia. They both went to the same places yet saw different things and took different photos, due to their different cameras and generations. Mark shoots film, and Irina shoots digital. Mark grew up shooting photographs in the 60’s and Irina in the 80’s. Their daughter wrote the title text. Together, their different positionalities blend to complement a shared reality of parenting. While Morgan and I have very different upbringings and styles, we connect through shared institutional reference and taste.
