Conversation: Productive Failure and Queer Photography
Participants: Alpesh K. Patel and Carlotta Boettcher
Carlotta Boettcher. Gay Parade III. Civic Center, San Francisco Urban Portraits series, 1972-1978. © Carlotta Boettcher. Courtesy of the artist.
Taking as a point of departure Alpesh Patel’s research on productive failure and queer creative practices, this conversation highlights the pioneering photographic work of Carlotta Boettcher. Her series San Francisco Urban Portraits evidence how, in the early 70s, the concepts of family, identity, gender, and sexual orientation were renegotiated and recreated by the emergence of a new sense of community.
This program is presented thanks to generous support from Arts Connection Foundation.
About the Speakers
Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an associate professor of contemporary art and visual culture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. His art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. A frequent contributor of exhibition reviews to artforum.com, he also writes for frieze, Artforum, Art in America, and Hyperallergic.
Carlotta Boettcher is a Cuban-born documentary photographer. She studied philosophy and art history at the University of Madrid and later studied printmaking at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Inspired by the growing movement of cultural and sociopolitical unrest that was happening in the United States in the late sixties, she moved to San Francisco in 1971—where she pursued a BA in Photography and an MA in Film and Visual Anthropology at San Francisco State University. Her work addresses family, identity, gender, and strategies of survival and resistance in everyday life.
