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Jim Dow signs a copy of his book "American Studies" on the CDS front porch in September 2011.
Photographer Jim Dow will return to the Duke campus this week as a Visiting Artist in Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program. He will present a slideshow and lecture, “Walker Evans as a Post-Modern Construction,” in the course Innovation and Tradition in the Documentary Arts; the event is free and open to the public.
Wednesday, March 21, 9:30 a.m.
MFA Carpentry Shop, 2nd Floor
1509 Campus Drive, at the corner of Campus and Maxwell
Durham, North Carolina
Dow is a professor of photography at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Last year his book American Studies was published by powerHouse Books and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies; it has since gone into a second printing. American Studies is a compendium of many of Dow’s best-known images, which were made over almost forty years of traveling the country with his large-format camera. (Click here for a podcast of his talk at CDS.) Dow’s vision grows in part out of the influence of Walker Evans, whom he knew and whose negatives he printed for Evans’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
“Photographer Jim Dow admiringly prints the cover of his old Rand McNally road atlas alongside the pictures in his new coffee-table collection, American Studies—but, flipping through Dow’s evocative, nostalgic, sometimes haunting images of roadside scenes, taken across 27 different states and over the span of four decades, it’s easy to agree with this bit from his afterword: ‘This book,’ Dow writes, ‘is an atlas of its own.’”—Life
