Carl Chiarenza’s images, though nominally two-dimensional, suggest other things, sometimes beings but more often scapes — deep, complex, convoluted spaces through which the viewer’s eye seeks to wander, drawn almost irresistibly into the intricate folds of this purely illusory terrain. […]
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John Pfahl’s innovative work in landscape photography focused on the problems of perception and representation. He systematically questioned the medium. His early and probably best-known series, “Altered Landscapes,” is a perfect example of his constant quest. […] In the half-century of its existence SPE transformed itself from its original form as an unofficial, photo-specific splinter division of the College Art Association into something akin to photography’s equivalent of the Audubon Society: $20 plus an interest in birds gets you in — and they’ll waive the interest in birds. […] Somehow, despite the separate and combined successes of K-12 photo-education, visual literacy, and media literacy, the ability to attend closely and thoughtfully to photographic images, and to analyze and evaluate them critically, has yet to become a widespread skill among the populace at large. This does not bode well for the future. […] We are the “illiterates of the future” Moholy warned us about; and our children will be the illiterates of an even more hopeless future unless we transcend our current fantasies about photography education and align them at last with the higher realities of our time and place. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |