Photography Council’s Lunchtime Talk: Allison Grant and Evan Baden

Free to the public. People are welcome to bring their lunch.

Within the Bittersweet: Artist and Publisher Talk with Allison Grant and Evan Baden

Photographer Allison Grant will discuss Within the Bittersweet, her long-form photographic project that explores the emotional weight of raising her daughters in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, against the backdrop of climate crisis and local industrial pollution. Drawing on a long tradition of socially conscious photographers who make political work laden with the personal, her images negotiate pressing new concerns as our planet undergoes rapid and irreversible change.

Grant will be joined by Oregon State University professor and publisher Evan Baden, who oversees Composit Press. Composit is a student-run press that recently published a monograph of Grant’s project. Baden will share insights into the publication process and evolving landscape of photo book publishing.

Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and Associate Professor of Photography at The University of Alabama. Her artworks have been widely exhibited and are held in collections at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Columbia College Chicago, King County Portable Works Collection and several private and corporate collections. Grant was named on the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s 2022 Silver List. She received the 2020 Portfolio Purchase Award from the Atlanta Photography Group, the 2019 Developed Work Fellowship from the Midwest Center for Photography and was shortlisted for the 2019 FotoFilmic Mesh Prize. Editorial photographs by Grant have been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Evan Baden is an acclaimed practitioner of photography. He earned his MFA from Columbia College in Chicago in 2014. He has had numerous international exhibitions, publications, and his work is held in a number of important public collections. His work has been featured in numerous publications including TIME, The Guardian, FOAM, New York Magazine, Le Monde, D della Repubblica, Geo, and DIE ZEIT and many others. He has been a recipient of the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the Stuart Abelson Graduate Research Fellowship, and Artist in Residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He has been a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award, The McKnight Fellowship for Photography, and the Outwin Boochever. He is currently the owner of Push Pull Editions and the Director of COMPOSIT Press as well as an Instructor at Oregon State University in Corvalis, Oregon.

The Lunchtime Talk series is a presentation of the Portland Art Museum’s
Photography Council.