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Reflections of Place

An Evening of Poetry and Photography
Speaker
Forrest Gander
Lukas Felzmann
Date
Thu February 13th 2025, 4:30 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
The Bill Lane Center for the American West
The Stanford Creative Writing Program
Cantor Arts Center
Location
Cantor Arts Center, Cantor Auditorium
328 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA 94305
Audience
Everyone
Admission Information

This is a free, on-campus event open to everyone. Advance registration is recommended. This event will be recorded. The recording will be available on this page two weeks after the event concludes. 

Request for Disability Accommodations and/or Accessibility Information

Desert sand with cactus

 

Immerse yourself in a profound exploration of land, memory, and identity through poetry and photography. 

Join us for a unique poetry reading featuring works from Mojave Ghost by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander and Ground, a captivating photography book by Lukas Felzmann.

Cactus in a dessert book cover

Mojave Ghost, Gander's latest work that navigates the landscapes of his upbringing in the Mojave Desert and his current home in Northern California. Through an intimate lens, Gander reflects on themes of grief, loss, and renewal, weaving together personal experiences with the striking realities of the environment.

In Mojave Ghost, Gander crafts an emotional journey that resonates with readers, drawing connections between the physical landscape and the inner self. He addresses themes of grief, loss, and renewal, weaving personal narratives with the stark realities of the environment. With a background in geology, Gander draws parallels between the fractured landscapes of California and the emotional terrain of our lives, inviting audiences to reflect on their own connections to place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book cover with text Across Ground

 

For over thirty years the Zurich-born, San-Francisco based artist Lukas Felzmann has been making poetic images that explore the intersection of the natural environment and human life. Across Ground presents two new photography books by Felzmann which, like an epiclandscape poem, take us on an allusive journey through a scarred landscape.

Ground weaves together a series of black-and-white topographical details of California’s fifty-eight counties to form a conceptual atlas of images bound by an invisible grid. Using a large format view camera, Felzmann follows the border of the continent to the edges of small towns, capturing the liminal zones of nature and culture. Reflections on each site by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander guide us through the territory.

In Across Felzmann sets aside the grid and roams freely, collecting signs of human activity. From foothills to highways, in windows and reflections, across floodplains and focal planes, his lush sequences of photographs explore the notion and construction of place as much as the medium of photography itself. An essay by photography historian Corey Keller illuminates Felzmann’s visual language.

 

 

 

Headshot of Forrest Gander
Photo credit: Ashwini Bhat 

Forrest Gander is a celebrated poet, novelist, and translator whose work often reflects human and ecological connections. He holds degrees in geology and English literature.

His poetry collection Be With won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and his earlier work, Core Samples from the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated with numerous artists across various disciplines and has published several poetry collections, novels, essays, and translations, including notable works from Latin American literature.

Gander's writing has been translated into over a dozen languages, and he has received multiple fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has held prestigious academic positions, including at Harvard and Brown University, teaching courses on poetry, eco-poetics, and translation. Additionally, he co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for two decades, contributing to the publication of works by numerous acclaimed writers. Gander is also an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a member of the Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Lukas Felzmann is an artist and educator. He was born and grew up in Zürich, Switzerland and has been living and working in San Francisco since 1981. His work and installations contain sculptural elements, and through photographic means explore the intersections of the natural and the cultural. Current themes include our relationship to the landscape, and how we internalize and attempt to control nature. (Waters in Between). Another published body of work (Swarm), is an investigation and celebration of flight, musing on the working of natural systems, and how there might be control without hierarchy. The degradation of the marine environment through plastic and other materials is examined in Gull Juju. Lukas Felzmann’s work has been exhibited internationally, and six monographs have been published on it. The most recent is Apophenia published by Koenig Books, London in 2018. Lukas Felzmann has taught photography at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University for 25 years and is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. In 2018 Lukas Felzmann was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in photography.

 

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