Ed Ranney at The New Mexico Museum of Art.

[Kirk Gittings]

A good show of Ed's (all LF, all silver prints) curated by Katherine Ware. http://nmartmuseum.org/site/exhibiti...rd-ranney.html

[paulr]

Thanks for posting. I wish I could go to this. Ed was my one photo teacher in college. I doubt he'd remember me, but he influenced me profoundly.

He didn't seem to have much experience teaching undergrad knuckleheads like us, so he just gave the kinds of lectures he gave his Yale MFA students. I mostly had no idea what he was talking about. My friend and mentor, the school's darkroom technician, pulled me aside and said "I have no idea who Ed thinks he's talking to."

But all the mumbo jumbo sank in, and blew up in my head like time bombs over the next few years. It was like a class that kept on giving. No idea if the other students had this experience or if I just happened to be in the right state of mind at the time.

I'll always think of him as a deep thinker about the medium, as someone who wrestled hard with ideas about image making, and as someone who would take his students' work deadly seriously.

[Kirk Gittings]

I can't remember if Ed ever taught officially at UNM. If he did it was after I graduated I think, but I have memories somehow of sitting in some critiques he led. It may have been in Rod Lazorik's class that I took in 77ish when I went back briefly to pick up some classes I needed to get ready to finally go to graduate school. Anyway yes he thought deeply about photographs, sometimes on a plane of his own that I could not scale, but he made one think beyond superficialities and the obvious.

[Kirk Gittings]

Paul. FYI he has a new book "The Lines" about the Nazca lines.