Selection Committee for RSVP: Class Pictures

With two weeks left to submit images for the second installment of our RSVP online exhibition initiative, Class Pictures, we are pleased to announce the five members of the Selection Committee....
Zuzana Lapitkova, P. Elaine Sharpe, Dr. Jörg M. Colberg, Christopher Rauschenberg and Michael Paris Mazzeo.

Zuzana Lapitkova (SK)
Central European House of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia
Zuzana Lapitkova works as a curator in the Central European House of Photography, an institution of the FOTOFO association. The house functions as a scientific institution in the field of photography, promoting quality photography from Slovakia and from abroad. The house has its own gallery, public library and organizes public talks, screenings, auctions and other activities connected with the medium of photography.

Lapitkova is above all responsible for international contacts, projects and promotion.
She is active as a curator and manager in the project of the European Month of Photograhy organized together with Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, House of Photography, Moscow, Café-Crème, Luxembourg, ZoneAttive, Rome, Kulturprojekte, Berlin and Vladimir und Estragon, Vienna. She is a project manager of a pan-European research project The History of 20th Century European Photography and she participates in the organization of the Month of Photography, Bratislava festival.

P. Elaine Sharpe (CA)
P. Elaine Sharpe is a Canadian artist, curator, and educator currently living and working in Toronto.  She is an Internationally exhibited artist with career covering a 20 year span, working with digital media and technologies. She is interested in a broad discourse embracing acute arguments including and not limited to; the social construction of the subject, gender perspectives, the history of an individual, the ethical dimension of horrific crimes, the surveillance of absence, relational pleasure, the viewer of the work of art, the encounter of perception and affect, the uses of technique and the impact of technological media.

Sharpe is formerly the Director and Curator for O Born Contemporary, commercial gallery in Toronto specializing in photography, representing artists obsessed with all aspects of contemporary photographic praxis. They have exhibited a wide range of artists, including Jill Greenberg, Jessica Roberts, Jeong Mee Yoon, Edith Maybin, Dominic Nahr, Alex Fischer, as well selected works from Art Industry, an archive maintained by Sharpe that consists of vernacular and professional mid-century nudes.

Sharpe has been teaching about photography (both theoretical and applied) at the University level since 1999. She is currently completing her philosophy doctorate at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee, Switzerland with a Media Research specialization (conceptual, aesthetics, technological sublime, praxis, theory, methaxis). In addition to having received two Canada Council Research Grants in 2004 and 2007, she was a recent recipient (September 2009)of a full Fellowship at the Stone Theory Institute, Chicago, entitled: “What Do Artists Know” led by noted art historian, James Elkins.


Dr. Jörg M. Colberg (USA)
Conscientious
Dr. Jörg M. Colberg  was born in Germany in 1968. He studied physics/astrophysics at the universities of Bonn and Munich and moved to the US in early 2000. Jörg is the editor of the blog 'Conscientious', one of the most widely read and popular blogs dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. He is a faculty member of the international low-residency MFA program at the University of Hartford, Art School; he has organized successful gallery shows (most recently 'Bare' at Michael Mazzeo Gallery), and he has been writing for photography magazines nationally and internationally.


Christopher Rauschenberg (USA)
Christopher Rauschenberg was born in New York in 1951, has practiced photographic art since 1957, and has a B.A. in photography from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.  He taught art and photography from 1982 to 1996 at Marylhurst College in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

He has photographed in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Guatemala, Germany, Honduras, Holland, India, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United States and Uruguay.  He has had 86 solo shows in Argentina, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United States and Yugoslavia.  His work has also been featured in group shows in Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States.  Available monographs of his work include three books and a deck of cards. 
    In 1995 he organized a group of a dozen artists who joined him in a nine year long systematic photographic exploration and documentation of the city of Portland – and then immediately organized a second group of artists for a second nine year cycle (PortlandGridProject.com). 

In 1997 and 1998, he took three trips to Paris and rephotographed 500 of the images made of that city by Eugene Atget between 1890 and 1927.  A book of this project, titled Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget's Paris,  was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2007.

Rauschenberg was a co-founder and president of Photo Americas (a major photography festival in Portland, Oregon – now called Photolucida) from 1999 to 2003 and is currently a Board member.  He is a co-founder and co-director of Blue Sky Gallery, an internationally respected non-profit photography gallery, and was a board and exhibition committee member of Portland Center for the Visual Arts (the first non-profit Artists Space in the country).  Over the last 32 years he has co-curated and co-produced over 600 solo exhibitions and 46 group shows and has edited and produced over 60 art and photography publications.



Michael Paris Mazzeo (USA)
Michael Mazzeo Gallery, NYC
Michael Paris Mazzeo is a gallerist, educator and photographer based in New York City.
Since opening in 2005, the Michael Mazzeo Gallery has become one of the premier showcases of rising young talent in the field of photography, having awarded ten artists their first solo exhibitions in New York and including more than 100 others in group shows. Works by gallery artists have been acquired by major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Princeton Museum and Fidelity Investments, as well as by many private collectors.

In seeking to promote the work of more artists, Michael recently initiated the RSVP project, an innovative series of curated online exhibitions, complete with on-demand published catalogs and e-commerce pages for photography collectors.

Michael has curated exhibitions, participated in panel discussions and has juried  photography competitions. He has been a featured portfolio reviewer at  dozens of events including FotoFest, Review Santa Fe, Photolucida, Critical Mass, New York Photo Festival,  FotoWeek DC, The Center of Photography at Woodstock, ICP, ASMP and SPE.

Michael serves on the faculties of the School of Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography, the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and has been a guest lecturer at many other prestigious institutions. He also leads workshops in wet-plate collodion photography and antiquarian processes at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and in New York City.