Photographer, Professor Geoff Winningham to Present Lecture on Dec. 9 in Little Rock

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Geoff Winningham will present a lecture Dec. 9 at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. He'll discuss the vernacular architecture of Arkansas, showing many images from "Of the Soil," his book recently published by the University of Arkansas Press through a collaborative publishing venture with the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

LITTLE ROCK – Geoff Winningham will present a lecture titled “Working in the Eye of the Sun: Photographing the Vernacular Architecture of Arkansas” on Tuesday, Dec. 9, at the Arkansas Arts Center, 501 E. 9th St., in Little Rock. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the center’s Lecture Hall, following a 5:30 p.m. reception.

Winningham is a professor of photography and is the Lynette S. Aubrey Chair in the Humanities at Rice University in Houston. His lecture is part of the Architecture and Design Network’s 2014-15 Art of Architecture lecture series.

Arkansas has its share of vernacular architecture – everyday structures built by and for ordinary people, or architecture without architects, so to speak. Working in the early 1980s with Cy Sutherland, then a professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas, Geoff Winningham traveled throughout the state, identifying and photographing vernacular forms – houses, barns, silos, churches, schools, stores and more, many of which no longer exist.

Selections from his collection of hundreds of black and white images of those structures, as well as interviews with people long familiar with them, make up the book Of the Soil, recently published by the University of Arkansas Press through a collaborative publishing venture with the Fay Jones School. Jeff Shannon, a professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School, served as the book’s editor. Winningham will share a number of those images with his audience as he talks about the vernacular architecture of Arkansas.

Winningham joined the Department of Art and Art History at Rice University in 1969. The recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and numerous grants, he is widely regarded for his photographs and documentary films, as well as a series of seven books on the topic of Texas and Mexican culture.

This project is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The 2014-15 Art of Architecture lecture series is sponsored by the Architecture and Design Network, a non-profit organization, with support from the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Arts Center, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and community members.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact ardenetwork@icloud.com.