April 9, 2009
Organization of the week: UW Photographers Group
Editor’s note: There are many organizations open to the UW faculty and staff. Some have been around for years and some are new. Some are structured groups with officers and committees; some are much more informal. University Week provides a space for campus groups to publish their information, and this quarter we’d like to introduce you to one group a week. This week, Deborah Conger Hughes, a retired UW staff member, discusses the UW Photographers Group, of which she is a founding member.
Who can join? All UW folks — faculty, staff, students, alumni and retired people. We’re open to the whole University community, wherever they may be. We’re mostly staff, but we are getting more and more faculty.
What does the organization do? We are a kind of ongoing, flowing group — people come and go. We don’t really consider ourselves a club, it’s more talking about photography, looking at each other’s work and eventually getting the work exhibited. We have more staff than faculty — we probably have at least five faculty members and this is sort of fluctuating — and a group of students who come and go.
What we do is invite photographers of whatever ilk, whatever skill level, to see if we are the place they want to be. Film or digital — any method of photography is quite welcome. We put much emphasis on exhibiting — probably more than other areas. We don’t train people technically, though we’re very good at keeping people apprised of ongoing training in the area.
We meet once a week, at 5:15 Tuesday nights in T269 of the Health Sciences Building on lower campus. The meetings usually involve planning for exhibitions, critiques of members’ work and talk of future projects. New members are invited to walk in. The last meeting of each month is the big meeting, which features a speaker or a film.
We also have photographers and gallery owners come and do chats. And we go to openings in the area, and take people on field trips. (A recent trip was to the historic Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District, where the owner talked about the history of the Asian community in the Northwest.)
And normally, there are about two to three members every month who have a show up in the area. New members also are invited to join the group’s listserv and can access community activities on the group’s Web page.
We’ve been together for eight years. We now have about 150 people on the listserv and a core group of about 20 people who are active. There are no dues and no officers, it’s all volunteer, so when we put on a show everybody has to volunteer.
Recent or typical activities: Five members of the UW Photographers Group have formed our own group and have an exhibit up in Odegaard at the moment. (The group is titled Cinque Femmes and the current exhibit, Old Stories, is installed on the library’s first and third floor until May 1.) And as UWPG we have work in the Skylight Gallery (Word Play will be up until April 30).
Another exhibit, this about documentary photography, will be in Odegaard from July until the end of September. And then we have a yearly show for two weeks every fall quarter in the HUB Gallery.
How can I get involved? Come to meetings, visit the Web page (and the UW Organizations page) and decide if you want to be on the listserv.
Click here to see more detailed information for this organization and all the others on the list.
Would you like to list your organization on University Week? Our organizational listings are open to groups that are either sponsored by the University or meet on the University campus. They need not be formally chartered (a book group, for example, is eligible). To qualify for a University Week listing, groups should be open to all UW employees or all employees within a particular classification, e.g. the Professional Staff Organization. Groups that are for students only are not eligible. To list your organization, click here and click on “Post your UW organization.”
