Category Archives: Photography and Imaging

Fall 2013 Graduation Week: So many faces going so many places!

This Saturday, following years of all-nighters, critiques, finals, internships and hopefully some fun, 153 Art Center students will graduate. As that day approaches, we take time to celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world and, as is custom at our Fall Graduation, we also honor alumni who have already paved the way. Here’s the lowdown for the week.

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Thursday, December 12: Graduation Show Preview
Industry leaders, employers, corporate partners, donors and alumni get the first look at the Fall term’s graduating artists and designers at the invitation-only Graduation Show Preview. This event, hosted by Alumni Relations to welcome new graduates into the community, gives our graduating students an opportunity to network with potential employers and fellow alumni. The show features student projects from major fields of study at Art Center, including Advertising, Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Imaging, Product Design, Transportation Design, Graduate Film and Graduate Industrial Design.

Graduation Show Preview will be held at Hillside Campus from 6 to 9:30 p.m., with a private reception immediately following.

Friday, December 13: MDP Work-In-Progress Show
Media Design Practices is holding a work-in-progress show from 6 to 10 p.m. in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus (950 South Raymond). The MDP/Lab track will be presenting thesis work in progress from their Ciphertexts & Cryptoblob inquiry and the MDP/Field track with be featuring projects from Kampala, Uganda.

Saturday December 14: Graduation
Join us in the Sculpture Garden at Hillside Campus from 4 to 6 p.m. for our graduation ceremony. At the ceremony, we will honor three of our alumni who will be presented with Alumni Awards. This year, all the awardees received degrees in Product Design. Gordon Bruce will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Stan Kong will receive the award for Outstanding Achievement and Spencer Nikosey will receive the Young Alumni Innovator Award.

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True confessions from Art Center at Night students, captured on video

Each term, Art Center at Night holds an open house, offering current and prospective students a brief glimpse at what goes on within the walls of its open-air classrooms. It’s a fleeting, but essential, experience for career-changers and seasoned and aspiring artists preparing to make the leap into what’s arguably the city’s most high-intensity after-hours creative education. It’s also an opportunity likely missed by anyone with extended working hours or family obligations (i.e., those who need it most).

Don’t fret. We’ve got your back. At a recent open house, we asked students to get in front of the camera and share with us what Art Center’s continuing studies program has meant to them. The answers were as diverse as the individuals themselves. See for yourself in the video above.

Perhaps it’s time to contemplate what Art Center will mean to you.

Veterans enlist at Art Center to influence hearts and minds through art and design

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Art Center’s reputation, culture and even the school’s site in Pasadena have been shaped by the military veterans who have come through its doors. From the post-World War II student population burst, sparked by the GI Bill, that led the College to move from its Seventh Street location to the larger Third Street campus, to many notable alumni and faculty, Art Center’s history has been enriched by individuals who honorably served their country.

Today, servicemen and servicewomen—whose discipline and desire to make a positive impact align closely with the College’s educational mission—continue to distinguish themselves as students and alumni.

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‘Insights’ highlights: 108 high-intensity doses of creative inspiration in 130 characters or less

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

While Car Classic dominated last weekend’s headlines, with its lineup of head-turning, high-revving art-imitates-life works of automotive aesthetics and ingenuity. Sunday’s auto design showcase wasn’t even the only audacious display of Art Center’s creative assets on view last weekend. On Saturday, the College hosted a curated selection of seminars and workshops known as Art Center Insights. The invitation-only event offers donors and trustees an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be Art Center student for an afternoon (minus the mountain of pressure to complete competing creative projects). 

After a lunch in the student dining room with President Lorne M. Buchman, participants chose from the following Session 1 presentations: 3D Printing: A Revolution in 3D, Environmental Design: The Safe Aqua Project and Interaction Design: Evolving User Experience. Then came the second and final round of workshops: Transportation Design/Sustainability: Nature, The Mobility Innovator, Photography: Portraiture Unplugged and Fine Art: Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects.

Because Insights reaches only a small slice of the population who might benefit from it; we embedded reporters in each of the workshops and live-tweeted the entire event. Taken together, these concise dispatches offer a cohesive (if not comprehensive) narrative of what it was like to experience Insights and the inspiring ideas and tools exchanged over the course of all six workshops.

Some people dream of being king for a day. But Insights makes a good case for the rewards that go along with being a student, for a day or a lifetime. Hopefully the chronicle below will conjure some of that mind-expanding thrill vicariously.

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How Photo student Dave Koga learned to listen to his intuition

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by Dave Koga

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is by paying a visit to Pasadena and getting to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that landed Dave Koga in the Photography and Imaging Department of Art Center. 

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Self-portrait by Dave Koga

Why did you choose Art Center? I came to Art Center after leaving a 10-year career in the entertainment industry, where I served as a TV development executive. I have a prior degree in history and art history from UCLA. I have several friends who graduated from Art Center around the time that I graduated from UCLA.  I’ve spoken to them a lot over the years about the Art Center curriculum and the quality of instruction and their collective feedback has been extremely positive. When I made the decision to change careers, Art Center was naturally my first choice.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
I’ve always been a rational and somewhat linear thinker who relied on logic and intellectual analysis to solve problems. While this mode of thinking served me well in the corporate world, I found it often got in the way of the creative process when I started at Art Center. Learning how to rely more on intuition and observation when faced with creative problems was the biggest challenge and/or breakthrough I’ve faced while at Art Center. I credit two instructors—Ken Merfeld and Mark Wyse—with helping teaching me how to trust and rely upon the intuitive side of my brain. [For more on this, check out Wyse’s essay on repression and creativity.]

What are your most reliable and/or unlikely sources of inspiration?
Inspiration comes in all forms, shapes and sizes. That said, I find that my most reliable sources of inspiration tend to be music, poetry, painting and graphic design.

Who are your biggest creative influences?
My biggest creative influences include Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Winters, William Eggleston, Miles Davis and Frank O’Hara.

What do you hope to do when you graduate from Art Center?
My goal upon graduating from Art Center is to build a successful commercial architectural photography business that will generate enough income to fund my gallery-oriented personal projects.

Redefining future of professional photography for the digital age

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The Annenberg Foundation has awarded a grant of $75,000 to Art Center College of Design’s Photography and Imaging Department for an ambitious examination of the current state of the medium, the profession, emerging cultural and technical issues and opportunities for innovation in photography education.

“We are honored that the Annenberg Foundation, a leading advocate for and supporter of the field of photography, has recognized the timeliness of our investigation into the future of photography education,” says Lorne M. Buchman, president of Art Center. “We share a deep commitment to the profession and the art form. We are grateful for the Foundation’s invaluable support.”

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Art Center in the News, July 2013

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Alumnus Jim Root, art director at Cramer-Kasselt, was featured in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

From fuel efficiency standards changing the look of your car to top ranked film schools, from Gibson Guitartown to backyard beehive designs – here’s where you can catch up on any Art Center news you may have missed with our latest media roundup.

The Hollywood Reporter, “The Hollywood Reporter Unveils the Top 25 Film Schools of 2013” July 31, 2013: Art Center moves up from #23 to #15 in  annual film school ranking.

The New York Times, “Carlab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline for More Efficient Vehicle”  July 9, 2013: Transportation Design instructor Eric Noble featured throughout the Wheels blog about rethinking the size of the natural gas tank.

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Photo alum captures veterans’ emotional deployment to WWII Memorial

Millions of people regularly travel to Washington D.C. to see the National WWII Memorial. And yet, sadly, many of the veterans this memorial celebrates don’t have resources to make that trip. I feel strongly that they should have the opportunity to experience the respect and admiration embodied in the memorial. 

So, with that in mind, in April of 2012, I got involved in Honor Flight, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing veterans to visit the WWII memorial in Washington D.C. Fortunately, I was able to fill a need for a photographer to capture these men and women during their journey to the nation’s capital to glimpse this monumental tribute to their service.

My grandfather was a WWII veteran, and I wanted to do something and give back to the Greatest Generation. This desire became even more urgent after I learned that WWII veterans are dying at a rate of more than 600 per day; and that there are veterans on Honor Flight’s waiting lists who have passed before they were chosen to go.  The organization’s director told me that Honor Flight Kern County’s inaugural trip would launch the following month, on May 25, 2012 (Memorial Weekend).

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Photography and Imaging graduate wins Student Leadership Award

Photography and Imaging graduate Katie Buntsma. Photo: Chuck Spangler

Photography and Imaging graduate Katie Buntsma. Photo: Chuck Spangler

“I came to Art Center from a tiny town in Iowa and I thought I was going to be a big deal,” said Photography and Imaging graduate Katie Buntsma last week as she received Art Center’s Student Leadership Award for the Summer 2013 term. “I was certain of it.”

That certainty, Buntsma shared with the audience, didn’t last long.

“I broke my arm the first day of school,” she said with a laugh, recalling the most dramatic example of how reality put her ego in check. “I ran my scooter into a cement pylon and spent my first class in the Huntington Hospital emergency room.”

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