Ansel Adams Collecting & Connoisseurship Workshop with Dr. Rebecca Senf

Friday, January 10, 2025 from 9:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Registration required, enrollment limited to 20.
Lunch reception included.
Participant fee: $195

Wonder why some Adams prints are more highly prized than others? We are thrilled to bring you this exclusive opportunity to learn how to look at an Ansel Adams print like a pro with leading Adams scholar Dr. Rebecca Senf. We’ll divide our day between the Discovering Ansel Adams exhibition gallery, where we’ll learn to see the nuanced differences in Adams’s printing over his career, and the museum’s brand-new Carl M. Jacobs Study Center, where we’ll look closely at works from the museum’s collection—and from your collection—with Senf’s expert guidance. Top off this once-in-a-lifetime experience with an intimate reception.

If you need accessibility accommodations, please contact us in advance at [email protected] or fill out the accessibility request form.

Workshop Leader Bio

Dr. Rebecca Senf has been Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography since January of 2016. She is the originating curator of Discovering Ansel Adams, which draws on her greater than decade-long research work on the artist. Between 2007 and 2015 Senf curated thirty two exhibitions as the Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum, including Debating Modern Photography: the Triumph of Group f/64; Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence; Human Nature: the Photographs of Barbara Bosworth; Edward Weston: Mexico; Odyssey: the Photographs of Linda Connor; W. Eugene Smith: Photo Essays; From Above: Aerial Photography from the Center for Creative Photography; and Ansel Adams: Discoveries. Her exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography have included Made In Arizona: Photographs from the Collection; Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture; and Lives of Pictures: Forty Years of Collecting at the Center for Creative Photography, which she co-curated with her predecessor, CCP Chief Curator Joshua Chuang.

Senf grew up in Tucson and went to undergraduate school at the University of Arizona, studying the History of Photography. She spent ten years in Boston, Massachusetts where she earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Art History at Boston University. In Boston she worked on the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s major exhibition Ansel Adams from The Lane Collection, for which she also co-authored the exhibition catalogue. In October of 2012 her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press. She contributed an interview with Frank Gohlke to a volume from Bloomsbury Press entitled Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts edited by Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers. In 2018 her work with Betsy Schneider was co-published by Phoenix Art Museum and Radius Books as To Be Thirteen. In 2020, she contributed to the Mark Klett retrospective Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs from University of Texas Press and released Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams, a co-publication of the Center for Creative Photography and Yale University Press.

Senf has an active role in the photographic community, frequently participating in portfolio reviews; convening panels and presenting papers at conferences and professional meetings; jurying exhibitions; and speaking at museums (most recently, the Cincinnati Art Museum).

Senf has been profiled on the LENSCRATCH blog, in Photograph Magazine, and as part of the Mixtape Series; was named “Best Curator” by the Arizona Republic, in March 2012 and was awarded the “Rising Star” award by the Griffin Museum of Photography, in Winchester, Massachusetts. Most recently, Senf was named a 2024 “Woman of Impact” by the University of Arizona.