Santa Fe Art Institute Screening of Camp Girls
(Santa Fe Homes Blog) The Santa Fe Art Insitute will be presenting a screening of the movie Camp Girls on February 9 at 6pm in Timpton Hall. The cost is $5 for a ticket.
In 2006, acclaimed visual artist Gay Block re-photographed and interviewed women who were girls in her 1981 series from Pinecliffe, a summer camp in Maine. Camp Girls (which was produced in 2008 and runs 48 minutes) is a subtle documentary, which reveals volumes about gender, class and Jewish identity in the United States.
Block will inaugurate the Santa Fe Art Institute’s 2009 visiting artist and lecture season Memory: Shadow & Light – Art as individual/collective memory. Without memory humans have no past and therefore no way of contextualizing the present or the future — our memories inform all aspects of life and without it, the world makes no sense. Our perception of the past, conversely, is always influenced by the present, which means that memory is fluid and changeable. Because memory is not just an individual, private experience but is also part of the collective domain, cultural memory has become a topic in every part of study and practice. Some artists see cultural memory as becoming more democratic, due to the rise of new media. Others see cultural memory as remaining concentrated in the hands of corporations and states.
As a portrait photographer, Gay Block began in 1973 with portraits of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston and later expanded this study to include South Miami Beach and girls at summer camp. Her landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, both a book and traveling exhibit, has been seen in over fifty venues in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 1992. In 2003 Block’s 30-year portrait of her mother in photographs, video, and words, Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed, was published by UNM Press and began as a traveling exhibit.
Camp Girls sounds like an interesting movie. Were there any local reviews of it? Maybe I can find a copy on dvd to watch since I enjoy documentaries.
Gay Block has created a great artistic work because it will give those camp girls a few memories to cherish from their own past & others can also find change in the culture & personality over a period of time……
i tried looking up for this documentary all over the internet and couldnt find a source to download it. does anyone know where to get it from? the write-up looks impressive enough and happens to be a must-watch!
Activities like this that promote cultural awareness and raise money for a good cause, or a good organization while allowing the people within the community to take part in an intersting activity as an essential way to create a better community.