Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series brings alumna back to OHIO

Pictured is an image from Jo Ann Walter’s “DOG Town” photo series, which documents life in the small, working-class town in the Mississippi River valley where she was born and raised. Walters, MFA ’83, returned to Ohio University as the visiting artist for the Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series. Photo by Jo Ann Walters

Award-winning photographer Jo Ann Walters, MFA ’83, returned to the Athens Campus for the Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series, delivering an artist talk and round table discussion on mentorship—events made all the more impactful by the presence of one of her former students, acclaimed photographer and writer Nicholas Muellner.

Walters’ and Muellner’s Sept. 17 campus visit was supported by the Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series, hosted by the Photography + Integrated Media Program in OHIO’s School of Art + Design. The program’s roots date back to 1914 and the establishment of the Clarence White School of Photography in New York, which was the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. In 1948, Clarence White Jr., a professor of photography, re-established the school at Ohio University and, in doing so, created the first degree-granting program in photography at a major university in the United States.

The Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series features prominent artists and scholars in the field of photographic media, bringing those individuals into OHIO’s classrooms and connecting them with the program’s graduate students and faculty.

Nicholas Muellner read from his latest book, “In Most Tides an Island,” during a recent visit to Ohio University to participate in the Clarence White Jr. Fund for Photography Lecture Series. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Muellner

During the visit to OHIO, Muellner, best known for his photobooks, read from his latest book, “In Most Tides an Island,” which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation’s 2017 PhotoBook of the Year Award.

As an undergraduate, Muellner studied under Walters at Yale University. A photographer, educator and Guggenheim Fellow, Walters’ work is exhibited at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Walters taught at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design before accepting a position at The State University of New York’s Purchase College where she serves as head of photography.

In her artist talk and the subsequent round table discussion, Walters focused on her role as an educator and how mentorship can make or break the professor-student dynamic. Walters noted that she first met Muellner when he was an undergraduate student at Yale studying comparative literature.

“Nick was so passionate about photography that we formed a friendship,” Walters said. “I let him take all the graduate classes because he worked harder than the graduate students.”

She credited her insistence on not asserting authority over Muellner for the mutually nurturing relationship the two formed.

“I feel like a lot of students experience tensions when they’re starting to want independence (from their professors),” Walters advised. “Eventually, you need to disappear and become less important as they shape themselves.”

Walters recalled feeling very dictated in terms of her art as an undergraduate. Referring to it as the “beginning of the end,” she used being told what type of pictures she should make as well as other experiences in her early professional years to chart a new direction, deciding that her approach to teaching would be much different.

Muellner noted that Walters always showed deep interest in her students, their stories and their knowledge.

“In terms of the power dynamic, my experience with Jo Ann as a teacher was she taught you to learn things about yourself, not in like some simple self-help kind of way, but in the sense that you have to learn about yourself or you’re not going to learn anything,” Muellner said.

Laura Larson, professor and chair of OHIO’s Photography + Integrated Media Program, moderated the discussion and shared some of her experiences mentoring students, noting that both she and her mentees have benefited from those relationships.

“Mentoring requires the student to be actively cultivating a relationship with the teacher in some ways,” said Larson. “It is asking for more. It extends beyond what your expectations may be for the student. …Those relationships are generative on both ends.”

Muellner said he never saw Walters as a “mentor,” associating the term with the traditional power dynamic where the mentor shapes the mentee.

“Good mentorship isn’t traditional; it’s something more reciprocal and like a relationship that grows over time,” he said.