John Ganis, 2008 Award Recipient
The Harold Jones Distinguished Alumni Committee is proud to announce 1980 UA Photography Program MFA Graduate John Ganis as the 2008 recipient of the Harold Jones Distinguished Alumni Award
John is a photographer and photo educator whose current work is a personal response to the land and environmental issues. According to John Ganis, “the American approach towards the land is often characterized by mindless development and exploitation of both public and private land for corporate profit [and] we are now aggressively exporting this consumerist attitude to the rest of the world.”
His monograph, Consuming the American Landscape was published in 2003 by Dewi Lewis Publishing with a German co-edition titled American Landscapes by Edition Braus. The book contains 86 color plates and features an essay by Robert Sobieszek, and poems written for the book by the distinguished anthropologist Stanley Diamond, as well as an after-word by George Thompson of the Center for American Places.
John is Professor of Photography at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, where he served four years as the college’s Assessment Coordinator and was also Chair of the Photography Department for four years. In 2007, John was named the Honored Educator for the Midwest Region Conference of the Society for Photographic Education. His color photographs of land use in America have been published in Aperture Magazine, Camera Austria, Phototeckniks International, Blue Sky, and Photographie Magazine.
His work has been widely exhibited and included in accompanying exhibition catalogs from FotoFest International Biennial of Photography 2006; the S.F. M.O.M.A. exhibition, Crossing the Frontier . . .; Imaging a Shattering Earth at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, in conjunction with the CONTACT photography festival in Toronto. Photographs by John Ganis are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
John Ganis Biography
John Ganis is a photographer and photo educator whose current work is a personal response to the land and environmental issues. In 2007 he was named the Honored Educator for the Midwest Region Conference of the Society for Photographic Education. His monograph, Consuming the American Landscape was published in 2003 by Dewi Lewis Publishing with a German co-edition titled American Landscapes by Edition Braus. The book contains 86 color plates and features an essay by Robert Sobieszek, and poems written for the book by the distinguished anthropologist Stanley Diamond as well as an after-word by George Thompson of the Center for American Places.
After graduating with a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1972, John Ganis lived in New York City for six years where he interned with Irving Penn and studied privately with Larry Fink and Lisette Model. Ganis left New York in 1977 to enter the newly formed graduate program in photography at the University of Arizona where he studied with Harold Jones, Todd Walker and assisted W. Eugene Smith. In 1980 he received his M.F.A. from the U of A and in the same year he and Tucson photographer Sandra Schemske moved to Detroit where Ganis began teaching as a full time faculty member of the Center for Creative Studies (CCS). John Ganis currently remains a Professor at CCS where he served four years as the college’s Assessment Coordinator and was also Chair
of the Photography Department for four years.
In 1984 after concluding his lengthy photographic investigation of swimmers and several years of intensive study of dye transfer color photography Ganis began to photograph the landscape. In 1989 he was a recipient of a Michigan Council for the Arts Creative Artist Grant. His color photographs of land use in America have been published in Aperture Magazine, Camera Austria, Phototeckniks International, Blue Sky, and Photographie Magazine. His work has been widely exhibited and included in accompanying exhibition catalogs from FotoFest International Biennial of Photography 2006; Imaging a Shattering Earth at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in conjunction with the CONTACT photography festival in Toronto; and the S.F. M.O.M.A. exhibition Crossing the Frontier…. . Photographs by John Ganis are included in the collections of The Detroit Institute of Arts, The New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.