Speakers Bureau Speaker
Dick George, Tempe
After stints as a farm laborer, short-order cook, and jazz drummer, Dick George earned graduate degrees in English literature and photography. Following a long career as editor and staff photographer at the Phoenix Zoo, he taught courses in photography at ASU. His passion is exploring small towns in the Southwest. Descanse En Paz, George’s traveling photo exhibition, is visiting selected museums in the region, and he is currently finishing a book to accompany the exhibit.
Presentations are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
Charles Fletcher Lummis: "The Greatest Southwesterner"?
Called "The Greatest Southwesterner" by famed librarian and historian Lawrence Clark Powell, New Englander Charles Fletcher Lummis was among the first and most successful popularizers of Southwest culture as he saw it and, to a large extent, as he created it. Though nearly forgotten today, he was among the most famous figures in America at the beginning of the 20th century. An adventurer, newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and self-taught photographer, he searched the region for decades with a missionary zeal, collecting and recasting stories, fables, characters, places, and scenes that appealed to his sense of a glorious and romantic past. With his distinctive flair for writing and living alike, Lummis not only became a major contributor to Western mythology, he also created numerous myths about himself, routinely attracting admirers and critics. Drawing upon historic photos and selections from his writings, this presentation is a biographical summary tracing major themes and accomplishments in Lummis’s life.
• Host organization provides PowerPoint setup and sound system for larger audiences.
Descanse En Paz: Traditional Cemeteries and Handmade Grave Markers in the Southwest
Despite recent population growth and cultural change in Arizona, some rural Southwesterners still choose to make memorials for their dead by hand. Though rarely if ever intended as "art," the results are often a distinctive if unrecognized folk art which reflects both individual spiritual beliefs and widespread social values in the region. Together, the handmade grave marker and the traditional cemeteries in which they still occur also constitute open-air museums where we can begin to read some major cultural changes in the region over the last century. Drawing upon historical materials as well as original research and photographs made throughout Arizona, southern Colorado, New Mexico, and west Texas, this presentation discusses the handmade grave marker as an expressive medium with its own individuality, creativity, recurrent themes, and meaning.
• Host organization provides PowerPoint setup and sound system for larger audiences.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Walls, Boundaries, Lines in the Sand, and a Yankee Poet
Beginning with a reading of Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall," this presentation develops several ways of looking at the separations we erect between one another in order to protect ourselves, to confine what we deem dangerous, to declare ownership, to delineate sacred places, and ultimately to define ourselves. Drawing upon illustrations ranging from the Great Wall of China to the Berlin Wall, from suburban property lines to fences around traditional cemeteries in the rural Southwest, this presentation discusses that no matter who or where we are, there are always more ways of thinking about lines in the sand than we may recognize at first.
• Host organization provides PowerPoint setup and sound system for larger audiences.
Indispensable Memory: Photography As a Research Tool
With its invention in 1839, photography has literally changed how we see the world. According to one critic, the camera isolates, monumentalizes, and ultimately worships its subjects by literally snatching them out of existence for special emphasis. Photography can also vastly extend our range of perceptions, bringing to us places never visited, people we have never met, eras in which we never lived, and things too distant, too small, or otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Together with its ability to capture moments in time, photography provides a partial solution to the constant challenge of comprehending the phenomena of life. Using selected historical and scientific photographs, as well as snapshots, this presentation explores how photography extends our perceptions and creates a medium for a deeper understanding of experience.
• Host organization provides PowerPoint setup and sound system for larger audiences.
