Focal Point

In this episode, Chicago-based photographer Kelli Connell is in conversation with her long-term model and muse, Kiba Jacobson, along with Museum of Contemporary Photography’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Connell and Jacobson discuss topics of portraiture, relationships, and the performance of gender and identity within Connell’s series,Double Life(2002-ongoing). Additionally, they discuss works in the MoCP’s collection by Peter Cochrane, Zackary Drucker, and Rhys

In this episode, mixed media artist Joanne Leonard and photographer Melissa Pinney are in conversation with MoCP’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Leonard and Pinney discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Elinor Carucci and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen as well as their thoughts on photographing the lives of their daughters, feminism, and how they navigate depicting both personal and political subjects.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Leslie Wilson, in conversation with MoCP’s Curatorial Assistant, Lindley Warren Mickunas, discuss their thoughts on photographers’ relationships to the place and distinctions between color and black and white photography.

In this special extended episode, photographer Dawoud Bey and writer, critic, and photographer Teju Cole are in conversation with MoCP’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Bey and Cole discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Roy DeCarava and Melissa Ann Pinney as well as their thoughts on seeing, understanding, and creating images in the world today.

In this episode, photographers Natalie Krick and Lisa Lindvay join Karen Irvine, MoCP's chief curator and deputy director, to discuss works by Andy Warhol and Kathe Kowalski in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. In the process, the two artists also discuss their own work and themes of photographing family, intimacy, and vulnerability.

In this episode, photographers and activists David Schalliol and Carlos Javier Ortiz join the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago’s Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor, to discuss activism in documentary photography.