Claudia Smigrod, professor of photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design

Photographers Discuss Local Exhibit   LEXINGTON, Va. (Oct. 29, 2009) – Claudia Smigrod, professor of photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and VMI Cadet Even Rogers ’10 will discuss their contributions to a local gallery exhibit entitled “Picture/Words” at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7 in the Turman Room of VMI’s Preston Library. Both photographers are participating in a month-long exhibit at the Nelson Gallery in Lexington, which opens on Nov. 6. A nationally renowned photographer, Smigrod will talk about Neighborhood Watch, an exhibition of vintage and contemporary photographs taken in Alexandria, which revisits the subjects she photographed for her 1989 exhibition Portraits of Innocence. In the Lexington exhibit, her photographs accompany written statements by her subjects regarding the change that has taken place in 20 years. Smigrod will discuss her project and what the images suggest versus what is written about them. A photographer since the late 1960s, Smigrod moved to the Rosemont neighborhood of Alexandria in 1982. During the years 1987 and 1988 she began photographing local children in their natural habitat, one she said provided a stage-like setting for the “purity of childhood,” and the background in which she would document her subjects both from 1987–1989 and again in 2007 and 2008. These adults, now ranging in age from 23 to 32, represent a random sampling of middle class American society. Her original work on this project was supported by a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. “The Saturday presentations by Claudia Smigrod and Cadet Rogers are a great example of institutional collaboration with the local community,” said Col. Rob McDonald, associate dean for academic affairs. “We are fortunate to be able to provide the venue for a presentation by an artist of Smigrod’s caliber. And I believe that everyone will be impressed by Cadet Rogers’ work, as he is a very talented student and photographer.” Rogers will present “The Modern Pilgrim: Portraits on the Road to Santiago de Campostela,” a discussion of the photographs he took when he participated in a pilgrimage in Spain last summer as part of a project funded by VMI’s Summer Undergraduate Research Initiative. Rogers asked the pilgrims he met to describe their reasons for undertaking the journey in writing, and these statements accompany the photographs. Rogers received the American Culture Association in the South’s 2009 Roger Rollin Memorial Prize for the best student essay (graduate or undergraduate) on a topic in American Studies for this project. Included in the Nelson Gallery exhibit are photographs McDonald, from his Southern Writers series and featured in the Nazraeli book “Birth Place,” as well as work by Robert Williams, Christa Bowden, Binh Danh, Susan Harb, Jeremy Leadbetter, Clover Archer Lyle and Robert Sulkin. The presentations on Nov. 7 are free and open to the public, and they are supported by the Jackson-Hope Fund as part of the Dean’s Academic Speakers Program.

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