Audio podcast: Interviews

Audio – An Interview with Frank Van Deren Coke (1921-2004) , founder of the Department of Photography of the University of New Mexico held on November 19, 1982.

Photographer, critic, curator and professor , Van Deren Coke author of The Painter and The Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol The University of New Mexico Press (1964, 1972) recalls the establishment of the photography program of Photography and History of Photography at UNM, the development of the collection of photographs and of old cameras and rare photography books .

In the 1970s and 1980s The Art/ Photography Department of the University of New Mexico offered a program of study in the field of the History and Criticsm of Photography of excellence and became the most important Photography program in North America, one which was well known in the United States and abroad.

An interview to Ralph Steiner (1899- 1996) the great American photographer and documentarist on the occasion of his visit at the Department of Photography of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M in 1983. Steiner was accopanied by Willard Van Dyke (1906-1986) photographer, film maker and co-founder of the F/64 photo association ( Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift ed Edward Weston) and first director of the Department of Film of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Steiner who was 84 years old, urged students and scholars to commit to a photographic humanist activism one that would highlight the latent spirituality of human beings.

Ralph Steiner meets UNM students 1983

(Left to right) Willard Van Dyke, Antonella Russo, Beaumont Newhall, Ralph Steiner, Betty Hahn. Ralph Steiner kneels to receive Beaumont Newhall’s blessing

Interview by Antonella Russo to Beaumont Newhall in conjunction with the epynomous exhibition held at the Santa Fe Center for Photography, aired by KHFM, University of New Mexico radio station, 1982.