Rethinking William Henry Fox Talbot

In conjunction with the exhibition William Henry Fox Talbot and the Promise of Photography and to celebrate its final weekend, artists Lisa Oppenheim and Sara VanDerBeek come to Pittsburgh to discuss their practices and the influence of William Henry Fox Talbot on their work with curator Dan Leers.

Lisa Oppenheim engages the full scope of photography’s history from William Henry Fox Talbot’s innovations to 21st-century social media. She activates both historical and contemporary imagery and techniques to consider changes in the medium’s technology and consumption and in an image’s interaction with the photographer and viewer.

Sara VanDerBeek explores the relationships between images and objects, and photography and memory. By combining photographs with both made and found sculptural forms, VanDerBeek exposes how images inform and distort our understanding of a subject and the contextual experience of its time, place, and scale.