One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that it is hard to find people to talk to about photography. Certainly, many folks can speak about pictures from their own knowledge of life and art, but there are not many who share a common language gained from study and practice. So, when my former professor, Bill Maguire, invited me to attend his online photography class via Zoom at the height of the pandemic I agreed. I was looking for something to motivate me to make work.
F.I.U.’s photography program has a modest profile, its pedigree is solid, yet geography and the coastal centric art worlds of LA, SF, and NYC tend to get all the attention. Its story begins with Maguire’s decision to study photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the early 1970s after having abandoned the teaching of literature and composition. The high points of his first year were the visits by Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, each offering a foil to ID’s aesthetic. He returned for a second year based only on a rumor that Winogrand would be coming as a visiting instructor.
In Winogrand’s classes Maguire silently absorbed his phenomenally passionate words and ideas about photography, his thoughts about the works of photographers who were really photographers, Atget, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Frank, and many others. Winogrand turned him on to the photo documentary style that was most classically championed by the late curator of the photography program of the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski. In February of 1972, Maguire began to photograph at night with his Leica to see, as Winogrand said, what the world looked like in a photograph.
Bill returned to his home in Homestead, Florida. In August 1975 he began teaching photography at FIU. He brought many of the medium’s great practitioners, such as Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, Tony Mendoza (who taught at FIU) and Winogrand himself, to share their knowledge with the FIU photography community. The program would go on to produce its own greats, like Ed and Mirta Del Valle, Teresa Diehl, Tony Guilardi, Renee Cooley, Patti Reiff, Peggy Levison Nolan, Priscilla Forthman, Rolando Del Pezzo, Abner Nolan and Toni Chirinos, many of which would become professors themselves in their own programs and influence and teach many practitioners still to be known. The crowning achievement pedagogically for the program was when John Szarkowski spent a semester teaching at FIU in the early 90s. Known as “the shark,” he taught both photography as a practice and its history. The influence of his tenure at the university lives with the program still.
The question becomes, why this little program and why is its impact so clear on photography. The first answer is elementary; Bill found the perfect marriage between teaching students the skills necessary for making good pictures (an understanding of exposure/development and their effects on the form of the picture, the language of photography, detail, frame, time, vantage point, and the power of the photograph to be a representation of the thing photographed, itself) and a deep understanding of the photographic tradition over the course of its almost 200 year history merged with the importance of being able to write and talk about pictures as a way to understand them. The second answer can be seen by the numbers of students who not only go on to get their terminal degrees across the country, at some of the top graduate programs, such as Yale, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and FIU itself, but also the fact that so many of FIU’s graduates continue to make pictures for the rest of their lives, the mark of true success in art teaching, as per Richard Benson and Tod Papageorge, two of the great professors of Yale’s School of Art Photography Program, where FIU has consistently placed students in the last four decades.
So, when I first began to attend the Zoom sessions, I was not sure of what to expect. I quickly found myself caught in the life-or-death struggles of ideas that I had experienced over thirty years ago in my FIU intermediate photography class. Photography is a simple practice, as Henri Cartier Bresson said, "(It) doesn't take much brains...it takes a sensitivity, a finger and two legs." But what makes a photograph good is a question which must be answered again and again. I spent many sleepless nights arguing the question in my mind after the many sessions which began on weekdays but soon settled into a Saturday afternoon experience. I found myself angry at people I loved over the simplest of remarks, but that is art, it is hard to separate your work from yourself, so remarks about it will also hit you where you live. Over time the group, that began with alumni and students, soon expanded to colleagues and acquaintances, because a critical mind needs work to keep it going and two hours of discourse can churn up anywhere from two to four bodies of work a week.
It was my notion that we should put together a show, some performative act to encapsulate the experience that I was sure would end with the pandemic. What began as just the existing cast of characters of our weekly meetings has expanded to alumni, we can still get a hold of and then some. I had offered to turn the curatorial decisions over to Bill and Peggy Levison Nolan, but in their egalitarian way, they both asked the group to help choose the work, though as Peggy has said, “Bill and I trump everyone.”
So here you have it, the digital light manifestation of over a year of arguments and many lifetimes of work. If it seems impressive, it’s because it is. There is a lot of good work here and even if we do not all agree with the choices of one picture over another, it is the product of an embarrassment of riches in talent and great work, the “poetic uses of bare faced facts.”
Where we go from here? I do not know, but it has been one hell of a ride. I hope it lasts.
Hugo Fernandez
September 2021