Slade Show

In his best-selling book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers an explanation of how ideas or trends spread. One key element: connectors, or people who know people. To prove his point, Gladwell created a simple test based on a random list of names from the phone book. “Connectors” are those who know more names than not. The test provides a rough estimation of the extent of a person’s social circle (or, for some of us, the lack of one) and, by extension, his or her status as a conduit for new ideas. Within the world of photography, George Slade qualifies as a serious connector. Whether the subject is Alec Soth or Lee Friedlander, Ted Hartwell or John Szarkowski, Slade is a big part of why the public knows these names.

Slade’s role as artistic director of the burgeoning Minnesota Center for Photography has something to do with it, but what makes him a connector has as much or more to do with history—his own and that of the institutions and undertakings with which he’s been associated in one way or another over the years. He’s done a little of everything that a curator, art historian, and writer can do—from serving as a photo researcher and the editor of a photographic arts magazine to his role as director of the McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers Program, which he continues to oversee, and his current side gig as an adjunct assistant curator for the Lee Friedlander exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “I wouldn’t call myself a jack-of-all-trades, but a jack-of-many-institutions,” says Slade. “I think I’ve done something with every institution in the state that has the slightest hint of an interest in photography.”

When Slade talks about his evolution from St. Paul native son to head of the Minnesota Center for Photography via New Haven and New York City, the story includes many asides that ultimately converge into a coherent thread. His pursuit of a career in photography has included stints at Magnum Photos and Aperture magazine in New York, which he calls his “graduate education”; a period working in the Walker Art Center bookstore, where he absorbed the history of modern art; and his first inroad into the curatorial craft putting together shows for pARTs (short for Photographic Arts) gallery, the precursor to the Minnesota Center for Photography. In the process, he has managed to cross paths with a cross-section of the photography world that includes many Twin Cities notables. Slade participated in a workshop led by Garry Winogrand in 1981 at Film in the Cities alongside Wing Young Huie and Paul Shambroom, two Twin Cities–based photographers who have gained national reputations. As a college student, he used to drop by the office of the late Ted Hartwell, MIA photography curator, during school breaks to smoke and tell stories. The late director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Jim Czarniecki, gave Slade one of his first breaks—the chance to give a lecture on Margaret Bourke–White. And on and on.

Not that Slade is a name-dropper. He’s actually a humble, unassuming man whose manner is measured and reflective; he’s even a bit surprised to be a subject of interest to a magazine. As a writer himself, he displays a good-humored aversion to the spotlight. If he has autobiographical tendencies, it’s in the subject matter he chooses. Case in point: He recently received a grant in support of his forthcoming book, Looking Homeward: Notes on Photographic Minnesota, to be published in 2009 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. The topic hints at an early and abiding interest in the region that still informs his approach as a curator.

While an undergraduate at Yale, Slade began making the transition from aspiring photographer to commentator, and, ultimately, curator, under the influence of high-profile mentors such as photography historian and author Alan Trachtenberg. Says Slade: “The more I studied, the more I realized other people’s work was really fascinating to me.” He cites street photographer Garry Winogrand as an early influence and recites a laundry list of photo greats who followed closely on the heels of his Winogrand infatuation—Tom Arndt, Jerome Liebling, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Robert Frank . . . . “And I’ve not even quite gotten up to 1970 yet,” he says. “Things really explode after that.”

Slade’s trajectory mirrors what he describes as the “whole evolution toward a more personal stake in photographs.” Personal, informative, and transformative. “The photographer’s art lies in the ability to utilize the physical in pursuit of the ethereal, the intangible. If used properly, photography can not only inform, it can also enlighten and transform,” says Slade. “I like photographs that engage me formally and reward continued inspection.”

His foray to the east notwithstanding, Slade takes a particularly Midwestern, even Minnesotan, curatorial stance. “The Midwest is a good place to grow up because it gives you perspective,” he says. “It gives you an ability to weigh the influences and power of a wide variety of creative undertakings.” He invokes fellow curators with Midwestern roots such as John Szarkowski, who was director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for nearly thirty years, as an inspiration. “I’ve always taken heart that Szarkowski was a Midwesterner,” says Slade, who notes that the one-time Walker staff photographer spent time canoeing in the Boundary Waters just as Slade did as a kid. Slade points to Szarkowski’s The Face of Minnesota project, a collection of images taken in the 1950s while he was at the Walker, as a touchstone. “I remember discovering that he’d done that book and thinking that was further confirmation that the Midwest is a good place for a curator to come from.”

But Slade’s feelings about the Midwest extend beyond pride of place. According to him, Minnesota has long been a hospitable place for photographers, photography students, and photography enthusiasts alike going back to the midtwentieth century, during Jerome Liebling’s two-decade tenure at the University of Minnesota. That, combined with a bevy of foundations providing support to midcareer artists, has made Minnesota a magnet for artists of every stripe and a hospitable milieu for making and showing art. All of those factors fueled the Minnesota Center for Photography’s rise from an artist-centered gallery space over Hagen Auto Body in Uptown to its current incarnation as a regional center located in gallery-rich Northeast Minneapolis.

Slade began curating shows for pARTs in 1993 (the center was renamed in 2002 to reflect a more expansive mission). He became center artistic director in 2003. “The notion of pARTs came about in part because of the room full of greasy car parts you had to pass to get to the gallery,” says Slade. “Paint fumes would seep up from the floor boards” and there was “a limited audience” willing to make the trek. The gallery moved to the Calhoun Building on Lake near Lyndale in 1996, at first occupying a basement space and eventually making the breakthrough to street–level as well.

“When I came on [at MCP] my sense of mission for the organization was to put it on a playing field that included more international artists but continued to recognize the wealth of work in Minnesota and the value of working in Minnesota,” says Slade. “I also wanted to figure out what our region is. What does the Midwest mean as a geographic region and is there a definitive aesthetic within that?”

Minnesota Center for Photography’s biannual Photocentric exhibit embodies Slade’s desire to both celebrate and ruminate on the aesthetic scope of the region. The show’s premise is to highlight work by photographers within a 525-mile radius—roughly a day’s drive in any direction from Minneapolis. Jurors for the last two shows have come from regional arts powerhouses: Joan Rothfuss, formerly from the Walker Art Center, and Lisa Hostetler at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The center also has the Minnesota Projects Gallery dedicated to the work of photographers based in the state, a further nod to the creative riches close to home.

If Slade is a connector, he has also played a role in creating a tipping point toward exposure of Minnesota–based photographers and for photography as a whole. “There’s no shortage of excellent photography to see on the walls in the Twin Cities,” says Slade. “I can’t say that MCP has caused this to happen—there’s always been room for photography at local venues, whether commercial or nonprofit—but I’d like to think that the work we’ve done over the past few years has helped enlighten everyone about the great range of contemporary photographic art and prompted institutions to look more closely and seriously at the outstanding work of our region.”

As a historian of photography, Slade has observed two major shifts firsthand—the advent of digital photography and the flood of images that has resulted. “There’s a strange phenomenon with the proliferation of images,” says Slade. “People are more concerned with individual images at the same time that there are jillions more being made because of cell phones, digital cameras, surveillance cameras, even the occasional art photographer in the street. And yet, it’s still possible to get worked up over an individual image.”

Slade expresses ambivalence about the advent of digital photography. “Digital transformations in photography have been enormously enabling,” he says. “I’m glad that I’ve had a long time looking at prints made with light-sensitive materials. I’m sure the pleasures I’ve had in seeing these prints will become more and more rarefied in the coming decades, and I think that’s a loss.”

All the same, Slade sees a new aesthetic emerging. “The new prints have their own qualities. And standards of beauty either in imitation of older, analogue, light-sensitive prints or of nonphotographic work on paper or on their own terms are emerging to redefine the connoisseurship of the medium.”

When asked what prompted him to move back to Minnesota after his foray in New York City, Slade mentions a budding relationship and adds, “it just seemed like a good place to live out my life.” The Midwest is a good place for a curator to come from, it turns out, and in Slade’s case at least, a good place to return to, and reconnect.