The PhotoAlliance 2025 Spring Lecture Series is presented in partnership with: Mark Ryan Fine Art Services

Beverages at our lecture are sponsored by:
Fort Point Beer Company and Winery Sixteen 600

All photos © Amanda Marchand, Leah Sobsey, and Datz Press

Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, NY-based photographer and educator. She uses an experimental approach to photography to investigate the natural world and our changing climate.

The 2024 Lenscratch Art & Science Awards - 1st Place Winner; LensCulture Art Awards 2024 - Winner (3rd place Series); The London Photography Awards 2024; the 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Photography Awards 2023; The 2022 Silver List (Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon); Medium Photo’s Second Sight Award 2021; Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, 2021; the 2019 International LensCulture Art Awards, Winner (2nd Place Series); “Curator's Choice - 2nd Place Winner,” CENTER’s Choice Awards 2015. She is a MacDowell Colony, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Headlands Center for the Arts Fellow.

Marchand’s monographs include, This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (2024); Nothing Will Ever be the Same Again (2019); and Night Garden (2015) - Datz Press. Her artist books include, The World is Astonishing with You in it: A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers (2022); The Book of Hours (2018); Because the Sky (2017). 415/514 was published by Edition One Studios (2008). Her novel, without cease the earth faintly trembles (DC Books, 2003) was awarded Critic's Pick by NOW Magazine.

Marchand’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. Her work has been published in The Marginalian, Lenscratch, ARTnews, LensCulture, Fraction Magazine, and Aint Bad Magazine, among others. It has been collected by The Getty Research Institute, San Jose Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, Stanford University Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Glen Hospital MUHC Collection, the Bolinas Art Museum, and the NY Public Library. She is represented by Traywick Contemporary, Koslov Larsen, Rick Wester Fine Art, and through photo-eye Gallery’s Photographer’s Showcase. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is the mother of two boys.

Leah Sobsey is an image maker, Associate Professor of Photography, curator and director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  Sobsey’s multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into science, design, installation and textile. Her photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to photography.

This Earthen Door had its world debut at PHOTOFAIRS NYC, Fall 2023. Sobsey’s recent collaborative exhibition, In Search Of Thoreau’s Flowers, at The Harvard Museum of Natural History, documents species loss through Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium. Her work on plant loss is included in a forthcoming show at the Huntington Museum in California, Fall 2024. Her books include Collections: Birds Bones and Butterflies (2016) and Bull City Summer (2013), This Earthen Door (Datz Press, 2024).

Sobsey has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in private and public collections across the US, including North Carolina Museum of Art, Credit Suisse, Cassilhaus Collection, Duke University Hospital, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft Collection, and Grand Canyon National Park. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Virginia Center for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, Penland, The National Park system, Hambidge, Habla Mexico. Her images have appeared in Artnews, New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, Audubon and many more. Her work is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC.

This Earthen Door, a collaborative photography project between Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, reinterprets Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, a pressed plant sampler made as a teenager. A renowned and beloved American poet, Dickinson was better known as a gardener during her lifetime. Using digital film and the anthotype printing process, the artists have reimagined the original herbarium (housed by Harvard University) in the language of our time. Anthotypes are an early photographic sun-printing method that employs plant pigments as photographic emulsion. Drawing on the research and involvement of scientists and Dickinson scholars, this stunning project is ultimately a collaboration of poetry, science, nature, and light. The title, This Earthen Door, comes from a Dickinson poem, We can but follow to the Sun. With reverence for the earth, like so much of Dickinson’s verse, it illustrates the moment an invisible door opens at the world's edge – just as one opens through the light of photography. The book follows the chronology of Dickinson's original 66-page herbarium, and an additional booklet includes a piece of handmade, wildflower seed paper as a plantable Dickinson poem.

This Earthen Door by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey
Datz Press, 2024
Hardcover, swiss binding, 128 pages
ISBN 978-8-99760-562-0

All photos © Ala Ebtekar

For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances. Ebtekar’s recent investigations have created liminal experiences to longer notions of scientific duration beyond human timelines, in particular cosmic travel & the phenomenology of light. Considering light itself as both concept, medium, and even the possibilities of light as healing he uses a range of radiation in his practice, such as works birthed by daytime uv-light emitted from the sun, or night exposures that were produced by moonlight and starlight. With this method, his recent photographic works take a whole night to expose, continuing durational projects and works which he views as in collaboration with the sun and stars. Moreover, Ebtekar equally over decades has employed the tactile traditions and properties of bookmaking, page and illumination in bound manuscripts, and classical training in Iranian coffeehouse painting. His alchemy of combining these legacies weave into his commitment and own work in tandem with enduring centuries of reclaimed text & image archives, poetry, and translation.

Ebtekar holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited widely internationally and throughout the United States in such institutions as the ZKM – Museum for Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, the British Museum, the Xinjiang Biennale, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE, Asia Society in NYC, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, San Diego Museum of Art, The Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. His works are in public and private collections including the British Museum, London, UK, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, India; Orange County Museum of Art, CA, USA; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, USA; Crocker Art Museum, CA, USA; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA, USA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA, USA; UCSF Medical Center, CA, USA, among others. Ebtekar has been awarded residencies at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Sazmanab in Tehran, Iran, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures. For this project, Ebtekar found and tore out pages from volumes spanning the last thousand years—ranging from poetry and science fiction to religious texts and philosophy—that reference the moon and night sky. He then worked with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate to make their surfaces light-sensitive. Finally, Ebtekar would leave the sheets outside from dusk until dawn, using the UV-light emitted by the moon to create a contact cyanotype print layered with the cosmological texts on the found book pages.

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon by Ala EbtekarTexts by Alexander Nemerov, Kim Beil, and Ladan Akbarnia
Radius Books, 2024
Hardcover, 131 pages, 48 images
ISBN 979-8-89018-092-6

Fort Point was inspired by a love for San Francisco and a desire to make craft beer more accessible. Over the years, it has grown to become one of the city’s best-known independent producers, creating a wide range of new beers and even a line of ciders along the way. No matter the favorite Fort Point brew, one thing remains true — every can hits that sweet spot between interesting and easy to love.