Sedat Pakay wants Baltimore?s budding artists to understand what the legends taught him.
With this goal, the acclaimed photographer and filmmaker accepted an invitation to speak at the Maryland Institute College of Art this Monday.
“The important lesson to me is if you want to become an artist, you have to love what you?re doing. Otherwise, go do somethingelse,” said Pakay, who honed his skills at Yale University?s graduate school in the 1960s. “Being an artist is going to be a difficult life, full of anxieties ? financial and others.”
Pakay believes a lot of students, regardless of their medium, have “very little sense of what has happened before them.”
Renowned photographer Richard Avedon gave Pakay, a native of Turkey, advice he treasures: “He told me, don?t go the U.S. to study photography. Go to the museums to study art history. Train your eye to look, to stare, to see.”
“Sedat is very interested not only in an artist?s process, but how artists are able to survive over time,” said Christine Neill, professor at MICA. She asked Pakay to speak because “he?s articulate, his photos are beautiful, and his subject matter at times is other artists.”
During Monday?s lecture Pakay will discuss the “incredible distance” between photography and film.
Unlike the collaborative film-making process that often requires a crew, “in photography, I have full control from A to Z ? taking the picture, framing, light, subject matter, all the way to the finishing,” Pakay said. He does not shoot, scan or manipulate images digitally.
His photographs are displayed in several renowned institutions, including New York?s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian.
Pakay?s film “James Baldwin: From Another Place” is a favorite at festivals in both the United States and Europe. Two film portraits of artists by Pakay ? “Josef and Anni Albers: Art is Everywhere” and “Walker Evans: America” ? aired on PBS.
Neill says meeting an artist after viewing his art “makes the work more real. It?s an advantage we have with contemporary artists.”
IF YOU GO
Sedat Pakay speaks at “Artists on Mondays”
» Date: Noon on Feb. 5
» Venue: Brown Center?s Falvey Hall, Maryland Institute College of Art, 1300 Mount Royal Ave.
» Tix: Free
» Info: 410-225-2300
