Wednesday Lunch with David Travis

David Travis (AB'71), Author, Curator, and former Chair of the Department of Photography of the The Art Institute of Chicago, speaking. A specialist in the modernist period, he has organized a number of significant shows and contributed scholarly essays to their catalogs, including Starting With Atget: Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection (1977), Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs 1900-1930 (1979), André Kertész: Of Paris and New York (1985), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (1989), Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel (2001), Taken By Design: Photography from the Institute of Design 1937-1971 (2002),Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes (2008), and most recently Karsh: Beyond the Camera (2012). He has organized and presented more than 125 exhibitions of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and has also been active as a guest curator for other major museums. His exhibitions have been shown at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Osaka, the Museo degli Innocenti (Florence), and for the Patrimoine photographique of the French Ministry of Culture, which inducted him as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1987. In December of 2002, he was named a “Chicagoan of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune Arts critics. A book of his lectures and essays was issued in 2003 by David R. Godine Publisher under the title: At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photographers and Photography, on Talent and Genius.
Wednesday Lunch is a Divinity School tradition started many decades ago. At noon on Wednesdays when the quarter is in session a delicious vegetarian meal is made in the Swift Hall kitchen by our student chefs and lunch crew. Once the three-course meal has reached dessert each week there is a talk by a faculty member or student from throughout the University, a community member from the greater Chicago area, or a guest from a wider distance.