Kate Shannon === [00:00:00] Kate Shannon: You know, photographs are selected, the world extends in every direction. The world is loud and it moves, and photographs are static and quiet. And, so yeah, photographs deal with reality, but they're separate from reality as well, and definitely they're subjective, just like any other piece of art. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff, with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: Kate Shannon joins me today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ohio State University Mansfield Regional Campus, where she teaches image-based studio [00:01:00] art courses. Her digitally manipulated photographs have been exhibited across the United States, and she's received several grants for her creative activity. She will be the 2025-26 Artist Laureate at the Ohio University. Congratulations, Professor Shannon, and welcome to Voices. Kate Shannon: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. David Staley: Well, and I introduced you as a photographer, someone who works in photography, so, and I wanna talk about some of your individual works, but maybe we start with an overall statement of your practice. Kate Shannon: Sure. So, my work revolves around photography, that's true, but instead of taking photographs like a traditional photographer would, with a camera around my neck, you know, snapping photographs of the world as I find it, more often, my work involves using digital tools or curatorial strategies to recontextualize photographs that already exist. I'm interested in the ways that photographs connect us across time and also in the ways that the digital age is [00:02:00] changing the ways that we create, share, and consume photographs. David Staley: Mm. Kate Shannon: So, that's kind of my work in a nutshell, I guess. David Staley: Well, and I wanna talk about specifics and I actually wanna dive in more about these sort of techniques. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. David Staley: And, and where these ideas came from. Let's start first with Construction/Destruction. Kate Shannon: Sure. David Staley: What was this work? And I also understand that we're doing this in an audio medium. Kate Shannon: Right. David Staley: And I'm gonna have you describe your very visual work. Kate Shannon: Yeah. I think it's a good exercise. So, Construction/Destruction is a series of animations that I created, that deals with glass plate negatives that were created by the Wright Brothers to document their flying experiments. David Staley: Oh, wow. Okay. Kate Shannon: And the Wright brothers, you know, they were doing these flying experiments and they were super secretive about them. So, they had these glass plate negatives, but they didn't make many prints from the negatives. So... David Staley: Down in Kitty Hawk, they're doing these. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. But eventually the negatives were stored in their family's shed, in their property in Dayton, Ohio, and along comes the [00:03:00] 1913 Great Dayton Flood, which is like the greatest natural disaster in Ohio's history, and the negatives were submerged in water. And so, what remains with a lot of their negatives are, you know, documentation of their flying experiments with marks and cracks and creases where the photographic emulsion began to tear away. The Library of Congress has those negatives, and they've digitized them, and they're available on their website. So, I was browsing their negatives and I found these, and I just was so interested in the decay and the marks and these, like physical aspects of the images that became part of the image's story. So, in this work, what I'm doing is I'm taking those negatives, I'm isolating the damage digitally, I am animating the flying machines behind the damage, just sort of playing with, the physical decay, and then my ability as a digital artist to precisely copy, repeat, and [00:04:00] repair elements. David Staley: When you say make the airplane, I guess, animated, what do you mean by that? What am I able to see? Kate Shannon: Oh, so I isolate the flying experiments behind the damage, so I take out the backgrounds digitally, and then I use a program. at the time it was Adobe After Effects, just to have those planes oscillate behind the damage back and forth. Really simple, but just sort of exploring my ability as a digital artist, where we're at in the digital age with photography as sort of compared to these physical relics. David Staley: So, you said you isolated some of the water damage. Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: Isolate in order to remove, or isolate to do something else? Kate Shannon: Isolate to highlight, and... David Staley: To highlight? Kate Shannon: Yeah, to explore it and to bring it forth, which is also interesting because, if you research the Wright Brothers' early experiments, if you find photographs, often they will have been repaired, online. So, these original ones from the Library of Congress, they show them with all their damage, but if you look them up often you'll find them where [00:05:00] the damage has been taken away. And so, I'm interested in reversing that and sort of honoring, for lack of better term, but it's just like concentrating on that and thinking about the significance of that because I love the physical aspects of historical images and how they become part of the image's story. David Staley: How did you happen upon these Wright Brothers images? Kate Shannon: You know... David Staley: Serendipity, or...? Kate Shannon: Yeah, I just, I spent a lot of time looking, you know, I teach photography. The course I teach over and over, you know, we all have that one course that we teach over and over, and it's the Introduction to Photography, and it has a component where we do a overview of the history of photography. So, I'm always looking, I'm always digging into archives, and I just came across the wonderful collection at the Library of Congress who, you know, they've digitized a lot of their collections and so it's really fun to go and look. David Staley: Is that the sort of thing where you make a mental note or make an entry in your notebook and you sort of leave that for some other time, or when you saw these photographs, it's like, I need to work on this today, right now? Kate Shannon: Honestly, it's like I need [00:06:00] to work on this right now. I'm gonna grab 'em right now, bring 'em into Photoshop and start playing around. If, if I find something that I'm excited about, I tend to just go right... and it's easy for me to do that, 'cause I'm just, I'm sitting at my computer, so. David Staley: Well, and that was, I guess another question. These Library of Congress images, are you working with the digitized images, or are you working with originals? Kate Shannon: No, I'm working with the digitized images, yeah, and that's interesting too, because, like, I like thinking about the physical artifacts, how they're marked by time, and as time goes on, they'll continue to deteriorate; when they're digitized, that process is halted. So, I'm interested in sort of thinking about that as well. David Staley: Another project was called _The Insignificant_. Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: Tell us, tell us about this, please. Kate Shannon: So, this came about because I was teaching the same course, right, and we were talking about the history of photography and we were talking about the photographers that were involved with the Farm Security Administration, which was part of the New Deal, and they had a photography section which was headed by a man named Roy Stryker. And the images that we're all really [00:07:00] familiar with that came out of that photography section are like _Migrant Mother _by Dorothea Lange. David Staley: Dorothea Lange. Kate Shannon: Which is a very epic_,_ you know, dramatic image. Those negatives are also archived and housed at the Library of Congress, and they have digitized them and put them online. And the ones that I got really excited about... so, I guess when Roy Stryker, you know, he sent out photographers to document the plight of migrant workers in the United States, they would come back to him with rolls of film that they, you know, images that they had created. He would look at the film and, when he decided that an image was a reject, like unacceptable, instead of just marking it as a reject, he would take a whole punch and punch through the negative, which is such like a... it seems like such an aggressive act, you know? It's like, like even now in the digital age, we'll get a photograph that looks crappy and we'll go to delete it on our phones, and it's like, are you sure? Are you, you know, like it seems sad to delete an image. But anyway, so he's hole punching these negatives and those [00:08:00] negatives have been digitized as well, so you can see them on the library of Congress's website with these holes. And I got really interested in his act, you know, just like, why did he do that, but also just in this mark of rejection, and it got me thinking about what images are included and excluded in our archives. It made me think about, you know, today with our digital archives, the photographs that we're creating now, will we have any record or remnants of those that we've rejected or thrown away? So, in this series, I was just, you know, sort of exploring, thinking about those images. I isolated the holes, the marks of rejection, along with figures in the frame that were part of the compositions that were rejected. And the images he chose to reject were, you know, sometimes blurry or sometimes just not framed as iconically or, you know, dramatically as something like migrant mother. Other times, they depicted scenes where, you know, there were children playing or a festival that may not have aligned with [00:09:00] the FSA's mission. So, I was also thinking about how editing creates a story, you know, and how what we include and what we exclude can convey meaning to viewers. David Staley: You're reminding me that photographs are not just simply snapshots of the world; they are as framed and composed as any other work of art. Kate Shannon: Oh, for sure, yeah. And they can be dangerous because, you know, we often, because they're shadows of the truth, they deal with truth, we often make the mistake of looking at them and accepting them as reality, and they're not. You know, photographs are selected, the world extends in every direction. The world is loud and it moves, and photographs are static and quiet. And, so yeah, photographs deal with reality, but they're separate from reality as well, and definitely they're subjective, just like any other piece of art. David Staley: What I find kind of remarkable is that these rejected negatives exist at all; in other words, that they've been archived at all. Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: As opposed to have been, you know, thrown [00:10:00] away or incinerated or something like that. Kate Shannon: Yes. E xactly, and it makes you think like, what images along the way have been lost, you know? And so, I really appreciate that they're still there and that we get to see the ones that were marked as unacceptable. David Staley: Tell me how you displayed these. Kate Shannon: With that particular series, it was a still series, so it wasn't an animation or anything like that, I went downtown to a place that typically makes signs, and they printed them on, sort of, like, a hard material, and they were able to help me cut out the hole that actually existed in the original. So, they were scaled up and we could see the hole and then the figure next to the hole. David Staley: And you actually cut a hole in the... Kate Shannon: Yeah. Yeah. Online, I display them in a different way, but physically when I present them, that's how they're presented. David Staley: Tell us what that effect is. What are, what are we looking at? Kate Shannon: Yeah, so when you, when you look at the piece, you're seeing an absence there in the hole in the middle, and then you're seeing the figure sort of interacting around that hole, and you're left to [00:11:00] sort of reckon with this mark of rejection with the person, place, or thing that's next to it. David Staley: Was the hole always in the same place, in the center, for instance, or...? Kate Shannon: No, no. He would put it in different places, but in my series I centered the hole every time. Yeah. David Staley: Another project is called _Lifted and Leaden_. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so this is a project that I started in 2017. I was pregnant with my son and then I had my son, and so I was working a lot at home just trying to, you know, make work on the side while doing that thing, which was a big, and I ended up, I started to explore this gigapixel image, from the news media. It was an image of a crowd; a gigapixel is a super high resolution photograph. It's kind of like a panoramic image, but instead of just going from left to right, it also goes in and out. So, when you see a gigapixel image presented online, you can navigate, you know, deeply into an image and then zoom back out and then move around. [00:12:00] And so, as I was exploring this image of a crowd from the news media, I was able to zoom in and look at individual people, and I started taking screenshots and isolating people in the crowd, kind of working like a documentary photographer would if they were, you know, sort of in a crowded landscape photographing different people, except I was in this virtual space creating screenshots. I ended up isolating the individuals and, it was a rainy day, so they're wearing ponchos and stuff like that, and I left them alone in an empty space in the composition. And it wasn't until a few years later, you know, when the pandemic was upon us and we were isolating and, you know, personal protective equipment, PPE became an acronym we all knew, that I started looking back at the images, and they just... they were foretelling in such a profound way what was to come, you know, literally digging into the crowd, separating people, isolating them, and them wearing their ponchos and everything. And so, I like looking back at the series and thinking [00:13:00] about how the things that I'm making as time separates me from what I've made, new meanings emerge. David Staley: How did you happen upon this photograph? Again, tell us something about the process. Kate Shannon: Yeah, it, you know, it was just me digging around, exploring, looking at things. The original photograph was taken in 2017 at Donald Trump's inauguration, and it popped up, you know, and I was like, oh, how interesting. This is a gigapixel image, this is how they documented that event. So, in the past, if you view a photograph of someone's inauguration, you get this, you know, broad view, you see tiny little heads, but you can't zoom in and interact in that way, and so, I thought it was really interesting to be able to do that, yeah. David Staley: You used the word exploring. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. David Staley: It sounds like this is an important part of your process. Are you always sort of exploring? Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: And to me, exploring sounds almost like it's not directional, it's not purposeful; you're just sort of examining the world. Is that a fair characterization, or....? Kate Shannon: Yeah, I think so. And then, just like anyone else in this [00:14:00] age, I'm surrounded by photographs, they're popping up everywhere, and so certainly, I go seek them out as well, but often they come to me, like with that example, I think. David Staley: I wonder if that's one way of distinguishing who an artist is, that you're always sort of exploring the world without any sort of purpose in mind. Kate Shannon: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, and recognizing the things that come to you that you maybe wanna dig a little deeper into. For sure. David Staley: Tell us about the work you've been doing with the Rinhart Collection here at Ohio State. Kate Shannon: Yeah, so this is something I'm really excited about. This started last year. The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State has organized a series of public events called the Saturday Spotlight, and what they've done is they, put out a call for faculty, or it could be grad students, to come and investigate the special collections and choose objects from the special collections to display in that event, and then the public is invited to view them. So I applied to ,do this and got accepted, and I knew that the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library had some [00:15:00] 19th century photographs, but I didn't know, you know, to what extent, I didn't know anything about them, and so I made an appointment and I went to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and they're super great and helpful there, and I started exploring their collection. It's called the Rinhart Collection, as you said, and it was donated, or it was sold to Ohio State, by a couple named Floyd and Marion Rinhart. They were a couple that lived in New Jersey. They weren't artists, they weren't academics, Floyd managed a lumber yard, but around middle age, they went to a flea market, and found these 19th century cased photographs, so small photographs in cases. They fell in love, and they amassed a huge collection, published many books on the subject, and, yeah, now their collection rests at Ohio State. So, I spent the year looking through their collection. They're 19th century images, but a lot of them, most of them are anonymous, so we don't know who's represented, we don't know who the photographer is. The images that [00:16:00] I focused on were the cased photographs, which I said were these little one of a kind small images enclosed in decorative cases, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes. David Staley: These are different types of photographs or photographic techniques? Kate Shannon: Yeah, the daguerreotype was the first practical photographic process, it was really popular, and then, the ambrotype emerged the following decade and the tintype, which, just different processes, but they're all in these little decorative cases. I became really interested in the physicality of the images. You know, I'm viewing them, this is last year, but it was, you know, 2024, now it's 2025, we're deep in the digital age, you know, we have digital cameras, we have smartphones, AI is coming in and we're trying to wrap our head around that in the world of photography, and I'm visiting these tiny anonymous physical relics. And I became really drawn to their physicality, their mystery, and I started, curating my, you know, selection and then writing about the [00:17:00] images, thinking about the images and using them to trace photography's evolution and to think about the ways that photography has changed over time and the ways that it remains the same. I participated in the Saturday Spotlight and I've continued to work with and write about the images and now we are developing a six months exhibition, so a longer term exhibition, which will take place at the Thompson Library Gallery, the same objects. So, I'm really excited about them and then I'm doing some creative work with those objects as well, just starting to play with that. David Staley: Creative work of what type? Kate Shannon: Yeah, so, I've been taking the images and isolating the physical marks, dust, damage on the surface of the image. So, you end up with these images, it's like an empty space with these marks and they become these little like galaxies of information. David Staley: Hmm. Kate Shannon: You know, extracting that deterioration in that stuff over time. I'm interested in this idea of [00:18:00] having so much visual information and these galaxies of information coming out of an image that's anonymous and has so much mystery surrounding it. So, I've just started playing with that, so it's not resolved or anything, but that's what I've been playing with. Yeah. David Staley: So, I'm noticing a pattern here, if you don't mind. Kate Shannon: Sure. David Staley: So, water damaged photographic plates from the Wright brothers and negatives that have holes punched in them, you talk about sort of scrapes and things like this; are you interested in, I don't know what characterizes all these, I guess it's damage? Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: Or something like that. Is that something that runs throughout your art? Kate Shannon: I think so. Physicality, damage, especially in our age when images are precise, repeatable, packed with information, easy to create, easy to store. I love the idea of the photograph as an object that gets tarnished, that gets marred, that gets worn as we hold it and pass it down. I love thinking about that. David Staley: Hmm. I asked you about [00:19:00] exploration a moment ago; you just used the word play. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. David Staley: And you're not, you're unabashedly someone who plays. Kate Shannon: Yes, for sure. Yeah. And I am, I'm appreciative that I work in, you know, I work on the computer, so it's easy to play. You know, like I can always take things away if I make a mistake and, yeah, I definitely approach the work I do with the spirit of play. I have a lot of fun with the images, that I work with. A lot of times I'll bring in an image and play around with it and then abandon, you know, what I've done, but, yeah, I think play is a good way to characterize what I do. David Staley: Before we started this recording, we were talking about your students. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. David Staley: And especially the ways in which they engage with photographs today, and I'd like you to say a little more about this. Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: Because I find this really interesting, students today and how they react to these very, very old photographs. Kate Shannon: Yeah. So yeah, my students today, I work mostly with freshmen. I teach an introductory photography course every semester at Ohio State Mansfield, and it's the same course that I've been teaching the past 20 years. [00:20:00] So, when I landed at OSU in 2005 as a grad student, it's the same course I taught, but of course that class has changed dramatically. You know, we went from, the first semester I taught it, it was a film class and everyone had to buy a camera and Facebook, I think, came out the year before and no one had a smartphone, and so, that was where we're at. And now, you know, my students were born into the smartphone age. They interact with photographs in a dramatically different way than my students 20 years ago did, and of course, a much different way than I did growing up. Yeah, my students are interesting, like, they use photographs, they take photographs a lot, they use photographs a lot. They use it as a form of communication in ways that I never did. But I find that they're pretty underwhelmed by like advances in technology that I think are amazing. Like, I'll show them generative AI, which I think is, it just blows my mind that I can put in a text prompt and it generates an image for me. David Staley: Like Midjourney or something like that? Kate Shannon: Yeah. That's amazing, right? And I show them and, and [00:21:00] they're curious, but you know, they're kind of like, eh, you know, but then I take them into a camera obscura room that we have on campus, which is just literally a dark room, we blackened out the window, there's an opening that lets light in, and instead of the light, you know, just sort of spilling out into the room, it refracts upside down and forms an image on the wall. I take them into that room and they audibly gasp, and it's so hard to get my students that excited. And it's just such a simple principle, and I'm like, you guys know you have a device in your pocket that like, gives you information, like it has everything that you'd ever wanna know inside of it, and you can take images like this and put them, you know, broadcast into the entire world with a click of your finger. But, regardless, it's the simplicity, and I also think it's just being there in time and space, you know? Having their bodies within that experience, I think, being able to touch, being able to move around. I think they appreciate that and I think that the more they become immersed in these virtual [00:22:00] spaces, which are also amazing and great and you know, on and on; the more that they become immersed in those spaces, I think the more they appreciate learning about those physical processes and the origins of photography, and I think it gets them to appreciate a tool that they use now almost instinctively every day, and that they've become, you know, separated from the way it really works. David Staley: Mm. Kate Shannon: Yeah. David Staley: You said, that they use images, you know, the kind they take from their smartphones. Kate Shannon: Mm-hmm. David Staley: They use it as a form of communication. In what way? Kate Shannon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so like, you know, you could text someone like, I'm doing this tonight, or send them an image, you know. If you're going to a concert or something, you broadcast an image of that experience. It's almost second nature to my students, I think, to take out their phones, to record what's there, and to broadcast it and share it with others. And so, they're constantly sharing and sharing back and, yeah, it's a different way of using images than what I grew up with. David Staley: So, a moment ago we were talking about generative AI, about Midjourney. So, as an artist, as a photographer, you're not put off by Midjourney, you're [00:23:00] not put off by generative AI, you don't see this as, some sort of threat? Kate Shannon: I don't, I think that it's something, right? It's gonna cause us as photographers to really get to the heart of why we do what we do. You know, I look at it a lot like, you know, when photography was invented, painters were threatened, you know, and it was like the end of painting, but it wasn't the end of painting. It just pushed painting into these other crazy territories that I think maybe wouldn't have happened without the invention of photography. Photography liberated painting from having to be representational, and I look at it similarly with AI, you know? I talk about this a lot with my students. One of the questions I brought to them recently, I showed them the work of Penelope Umbrico, who, she's an artist that mines the internet for images that already exist, and one of her early famous works, created in the early 2000s, is a series where she appropriated images of other people's photographs of sunsets, which is a really cliche thing to photograph, right? You [00:24:00] see a sunset, it's beautiful, you take the picture, right? We all do it, and there are, you know, billions of photographs of sunsets online. So, she appropriated thousands of these images of other people's sunsets and displayed them in a gallery space, this sort of immersive installation of other people's sunsets. So, you walk in and you see sunset after sunset after sunset, and it's a great piece that I think just reflects on the redundancy of images that we create in the digital age and the amount of images that were surrounded by in the digital age. But, the question I brought to them after they viewed her work was why take a photograph of a sunset, you know, if you see a beautiful sunset, do you take a photograph of it? Do you add to this noise, you know? And now, with AI, you know, we have these systems that can come in and scrape up all of those photographs that we've taken of sunsets and use them to create novel new sunsets in ways that are more spectacular and beautiful than probably we could ever do by ourselves. So, in an age where, you know, sunsets are photographed like crazy, and in an [00:25:00] age where we don't need to make the photograph in order for it to exist, AI can do that for us, like why? Why photograph the sunset? And my students write about this, and some of them, you know, we talked about it and they said, you know what, I think I don't photograph the sunset. I think I put my phone down, and I just have that experience. I'm just gonna be more present in that experience instead of putting my screen between myself and the thing. But one of my students wrote, I am going to photograph the sunset because it's my sunset. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Kate Shannon: And I just love that. It's not a sunset, it's his sunset. And that statement made me think that he's thinking about, you know, why do I make a photograph? I make a photograph 'cause it's a reflection of my unique place and time and space. It's my sunset. So, we talk about those things and I think that's what AI is gonna do. It's just gonna force us to have those conversations and think about why we're making the photograph. David Staley: Have you played with generative AI in your own work? Kate Shannon: Yeah, not in my own work very much. I [00:26:00] played with it, like I've done things, like, I've taken historical photographs and then used generative AI to like expand the canvas because in Photoshop you can bring out the crop tool now and it just fills in, you know, content for you and kind of sketches, you know, just playing around. I've done a lot of work just playing with text prompts and seeing what it spits out. I have my students play with it in class where they'll take a photograph of their own, an original photograph, and then they'll use something like Midjourney to try to replicate the photograph as close as possible, and then we play a game where we try to guess which one is AI and which one is their authentic image. Yeah. And it just gets them to think about, you know, how to describe their photograph, you know, 'cause you have to describe it in order to generate it. It also, it gets them now when they're in these spaces where they're seeing more images that are being generated by AI, in my class I want them to learn how to recognize that, you know, so. David Staley: Have you always been interested in photography? Did you know from a young age that [00:27:00] you were going to be a photographer? Kate Shannon: Absolutely. It took me a while to accept it, you know, to like get there, but, but I did. I've always been interested in photographs. I have a vivid memory of the first time I used a camera. I was probably three or four years old, I was outside, I had a big rabbit named Kenny, and he was hopping around and my mother was outside with us taking photographs. And she handed me the camera and I looked through the viewfinder, and she told me, you know, snap the shutter, take a picture, and I did. And it was probably weeks or maybe a month later that my mom got the film developed, got the prints, brought 'em back to me, and I looked at this photograph that I had taken, and instead of my rabbit, it was just the side of my house, and there was a big orange blur in the frame. And my mother explained to me that, you know, Kenny, the rabbit hopped out of the frame before you snap the shutter and that big orange blur, that's your thumb. And I remember looking at the photograph and just [00:28:00] being so mesmerized by this little rectangle that showed me the world in a way that I didn't remember it. You know, it abstracted a piece of my body. It showed me this moment after the moment I thought that I had captured, and, I don't know, it just like sparked something in me, and the photograph has always been a way for me to find these secrets hidden in space and time and change my perception of the world around me. Yeah, so I knew I wanted to do that, and when I landed at the University of Kentucky for undergraduate school, I, I signed up for a photography course and the rest is history. Yeah. David Staley: Well, I introduced you as the upcoming Artist Laureate here at Ohio State. First of all, tell us who the Artist Laureate is, what this position is? Kate Shannon: Sure. So, an Artist Laureate is a public ambassador for the arts, and at Ohio State, the position was conceived of as a way for a faculty member in the arts to connect with communities across Ohio [00:29:00] that may be underserved in relation to their access to the arts. So, yeah, and so it, the position really resonates with me because as a faculty member on a regional campus, one of the most meaningful things for me on the regional campus has been to bring arts to that community and the surrounding communities, to create experiences where the community members can share art and also to work to elevate, the work of artists that are in and around those communities. So, I see the position as a way to extend some of that work. David Staley: What will your work be or what are you planning for this upcoming year? Kate Shannon: So, I plan to share the work that I've been doing with historical photographs. I'm going to talk about and share examples of my artwork. I'm also going to share relics of early photography. So, as I travel around in the different communities that I visit, people will be able to like hold a daguerreotype, for example. We may do exercises where we make our like little camera obscuras out of cardboard boxes or create prints using a [00:30:00] simple 19th century process called the cyanotype. So, they'll be engaging with historical photographs and engaging with historical processes, and, just like with my teaching, this is a way for us to gain a deeper understanding about photography and how it relates to this tool that we all use every day. David Staley: Kate Shannon. Kate Shannon: Yes. David Staley: Thank you. Kate Shannon: Thank you. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.