September 14 (Sunday)
Photography as Fine Art: The History of the Platinotype
1 p.m.
Photographer Tom Shillea talks about his creative career and his focus on the nineteenth-century printing process called the Platinotype, which was popular with pictorial photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. After the talk, see Tom’s work in the exhibition Platinum Visions in Payne Hurd Gallery. $5 members, $15 nonmembers.
Thomas Shillea earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. While doing graduate work at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, he was introduced to the platinum photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Session photographers. As part of his graduate thesis, Shillea coauthored The History of the Platinotype, published by RIT. He also published The Instruction Manual for the Platinum Printing Process, published by the Johnson-Matthey Corporation.
Shillea was commissioned by the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C., for a project titled “Gallery of Famous Americans” and a collection of some of these and other portraits now reside in the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery. His photographs are also in the collections of the George Eastman House, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The National Museum of African American History and Culture (The Smithsonian), the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum-Oregon, The James A. Michener Museum of Art, The Woodmere Museum, The Johnson-Matthey Collection (London, England), The University of Texas at Austin-Ransom Center, RIT, Lehigh University, and Haverford College.
Shillea was a professor in the Applied Photography Program at RIT and has conducted a series of lectures and workshops on the Platinotype process throughout the country. Today, he continues his work as a fine art photographer, an arts educator, and an historian as the Director of Art Programs at Northampton Community College, in Bethlehem, PA.