The lecture, a non-historical appreciation of the relationship between apparatus and image, complements Larson’s body of photographs displayed at the University’s Photography Gallery. The exhibition memorializes the medium of film as it is replaced by digital media.
“Larson will speak about the death of film, on the brink of its being taken over by digital technology. Film is a wonderful analogue medium that is now being subsumed by streams of numbers. Larson will talk about the last gasp of film as a medium,” said Judith Tolnick, director of the Fine Arts Center Galleries.
Regarding his parallel Photography Gallery exhibition, Larson explains, “Most of us, on some regular basis, escape into cinema. Ironically, there are no moving images in cinema. The mind is the great animator of the seemingly invisible stream of still frames that outwit and mystify human visual perception.”
Larson, director of graduate photography and digital imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in years since, as well as a grant from the Polaroid Corporation. He was a photographer for thirty years before turning to digital processes, including video. His works have been featured in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Larson’s URI exhibit in the Photography Gallery of the Fine Arts Center runs through Dec. 12. His lecture is free and open to the public, and it is co-sponsored by the Fine Arts Center Galleries, the Honors Program and Visiting Scholars Committee, the Program in Film Studies and the Department of Art.