This second intergenerational conversation as part of ICA@50 brought together photographer Zoe Strauss, whose first solo museum show was a Ramp Project at ICA in 2006, and Ashley Thompson, a promising younger shutterbug who met Strauss in Florida in 2012. Strauss was documenting the 2012 presidential campaign for Magnum when Thompson, who had recently purchased his first DSLR camera, saw her taking pictures of the Presidential Pawn Shop and pulled his car over to ask advice.The encounter led first to a friendship and then to a collaboration, as Strauss and Thompson set out to give a face to disenfranchised voters, including felons; Thomas himself had recently finished serving a ten-year prison term. With her vibrant warmth and vibrating enthusiasm, Strauss highlighted ICA’s pivotal role in her early career and celebrated the renewed joy in photography she found working with Thompson, whose Sarasota portrait studio cum barbershop helped inspire her Homesteading project for the 2013 Carnegie International. Thompson showed recent work (his professional photography services can be explored at www.facebook.com/GoldenPalmPhotography) and credited Strauss with initiating him into the joys of the f-stop. Grace Ambrose, ICA’s Spiegel Fellow and Strauss’s Studio Manager, who collaborated with Strauss on Homesteading, moderated the conversation with understated acumen, after which three-foot-long hoagies were enjoyed, along with potato chips, on the terrace. Organized in conjunction with Zoe Strauss / Andres Serrano: Works 1983–1993 (1994) (a microexhibition of ICA@50), this event was part of the Sachs Program in Contemporary Art: IntergenerationalConversations.
Ramp Project: Zoe StraussICA@50: Pleasing Artists And Publics Since 1963Zoe Strauss / Andres Serrano: Works 1983–1993 (1994)ICA@50Sachs Program in Contemporary Art: Intergenerational Conversations