Review of Christin Boggs's Speaking Light Lecture

On Friday, October 28^th, Point Park welcomed photographer Christin Boggs to come speak about her work for our Speaking Light series, which seems to be growing in popularity with every lecture. After the peer portfolio reviews that occur an hour before the lecture, which had an improved turnout of student portfolios this month, we gathered into the JVH auditorium for Christin Boggs to speak about her new work, Slow & Steady. Christin explained that her work is primarily food subject matter because food has been a topic of interest for her since she was young. After being a child of the unhealthy fast food culture and learning the unfortunate nutritional facts of these types of products, she began to try to eat healthier and research her diet more. For most of her college career, she made interesting images that artistically displayed food, one of them being a set of images of a potato being eaten bite by bite next to a set of images of french fries being eaten piece by piece. She also created a project where she made a calendar and for each day, she placed an image of her breakfast that morning. Although she enjoyed creating images in this way, she found that she was hating the monotonous nature of her eating habits and that she was eating out of necessity rather than enjoying the food. She decided to search for something more.

The solution to her relationship with food was found locally. She started researching how to participate in the locally grown food movement and eventually started working on some of these community supported agriculture (CSA) farms. In her second year of grad school, she had photographed about 30 farms around Rochester where she is originally from. She found that she loved working with the food that was being grown on these farms and the care that was being taken with it. It started mending her relationship with food in general and fueled her inspiration to photograph this subject matter even more. Her passion for locally grown food took her all the way to Ireland this past summer, where she went as a visiting artist to Cow House Studios, an art program which is located on a working farm in Wexford. She continued to capture images of the farms in Ireland just as she had in the United States and went out of her way to research other community farms she could visit while she was there.

Although this was a lecture from a photographer on her most recent work, I found that it was more of an inspirational talk for helping find one’s passion in life. Not every person’s passion is going to be for food and local farming like Christin’s, but she was a great example of what passion looks like. She is dedicated to her work in a way that every photographer needs to be. There needs to be a drive to research our subject matter or to go out of our ways to make the most exceptional art that we can. This passion should be the fuel for what we do and what we make, and although Christin may not have come out and said that, any person could see how she admired and loved what she had created as she spoke of her images. It was nice to hear her stories that came along with her images and not just how she took them. She proved that photography is a lifestyle and something that the true artist needs to commit a great amount of their time to.

If you would like to see more of Christin Boggs’s work, you can check out her website at christinboggs.com and if you would like to attend a Speaking Light lecture, we have one more this semester with Filippo Tagliati on November 18^th.

The rest of the Speaking Light schedule goes as follows:

November 18 – Filippo Tagliati

January 27 – John Holmgren

February 24 – Tom Persinger

March 30 – Stephen Chalmers

As always, the lectures begin at 6 p.m. in the JVH auditorium on the second floor of Thayer and there is a peer portfolio review session an hour before each lecture at 5 p.m. right outside the JVH. Come join us and share your work and even more importantly, show your appreciation for your fellow photographers. A special thanks to Christin Boggs for coming to speak with us; it was greatly appreciated! Thank you to everyone that attended and see you November 18^th for Filippo Tagliati!