PAC is pleased to announce a lecture and book signing with renowned photographer Judy Dater. Dater will speak about her fifty years in photography and her specific involvement in the art of portraiture. Dater is well known for her portrait of Imogen Cunningham and Twinka Thiebaud taken in Yosemite in 1974. Her recent publication, Only Human, features 100 black and white portraits and nudes dating from 1964 to 2016. The book is not arranged chronologically but according to the artist’s psychological and artistic perspective over time.

Born in Los Angeles, Dater came of age in the 1960s. Enamored of the larger than life actors projected on the screen in her father’s movie theater, she invented her own cast of characters, some famous, most unknown. At the same time, Dater’s work mitigates the restrictions and conventional choices imposed on gender. As such, her photographs portray her female and male subjects as strong, weak, independent, sexualized, but always full of life.

Julian Cox, Chief Curator and Founding Curator of Photography, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco writes: "Only Human is a taught and poetic compilation of images that emphatically reveals the breadth of Judy Dater's achievement as a photographer over five decades. We see that her photographs are concerned with acknowledgement, with personal identity and belonging, with loneliness and solidarity. The best of them possess a beauty, intelligence, and complexity that elevates them above the merely interesting to the often profound."

The de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA will be mounting a major exhibition of Dater’s photographs titled Only Human, featuring work form the book, starting April 7, 2018 and running through September 22.

This event is limited to 30 attendees. Members only.

Image © Madeline Wilson 2016