48 the Annual Society for Photographic Education Conference Atlanta March 10-13, 2011 This year's Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conference, themed Science, Poetry and the Photographic attempted to represent the broad spectrum of possibilities and manifestations of these three elements in today's contemporary photographic practice. The main speakers at the conference focused on various aspects of scientific inquiry within the realm of photography, with the poetry more to be found within the images themselves. Abelardo Morell opened the conference. He shared that his beginnings in street photography were inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson but his work took a very different turn once he was at home with his first child. There, confused and confounded, he observed his son's growing awareness of the presence of things, which led to such strategies as using a wine glass full of water as a primitive and elegant lens. His sensitivity to these often overlooked wonders is part of what makes his work so simple and complex, so utterly technical and delightful an intersection of photo + science = poetry. And then, of course, there are Morell's images from the inside of pinhole cameras/rooms, the familiar black-and-white images as well as recent color variations from periscoped tents on rooftops in Florence, Italy. He described the complexity of the simplicity of his work as, My own way of making a mark. In Art & Science: Investigating Matter, photographer Catherine Wagner explored the ideological connections among her varied projects, from the 1980s series American Classroom, which sparked her interest in science, to her current public art projects. Wagner's slideshow included Narrative History of the Light Bulb (2006), which offers stunning still lifes of light bulbs documenting their technological advancements, and which, taken as a whole, as a larger historical indicator. Her more recent work includes the series Morphology (2010) on genetics, and the compelling Reparations (2008-10), in which she explores historical prosthetics as a commentary on the current surfeit of war imagery that depicts destruction, focusing instead on the metaphor of repair. Photographer, scholar, and cyberfeminist Carolyn Gucrtin presented Freeze Frame: Image, Space-Time, Text. She linked technologies that depict aspects of space, from astronomy, pinhole cameras, and Brenda Dawes's stretched slit-scan panoramas to Camille Utterback's visual cubism and Michael Golembewski's slide-scanner images, which, said Guertin, function in a space that is more poetry than photography. Although Guertin responded with grace to the myriad technical difficulties encountered during her presentation, the material was perhaps too complex, and the hour too late, to effectively transcend this challenge. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Pinky Bass opened her slide (yes, slide) show, Can I Still Call Myself a Photographer?, with an iconic photographic image of the 1950s woman: smart blue dress, perfectly styled hair, short white gloves, and a matching purse. It was a photograph of the artist. Later she would seek out similar purses to alter into pinhole cameras. Bass's work is fearless; she refers to it as demythologizing how we see through exploration, and notes the accidents, miracles, and gifts that have given direction and guidance to her work and life. A series of works made during her sister's battle with cancer incorporated handwork, sewing on prints and marking the inner workings of the body, based on science and imagination. She also created music boxes that play notes as paper pierced with holes is fed through. She closed by playing several images of her sister and her brain scans. Bea Nettles took the audience through a collection of photographic/poetry book collaborations between her and her late mother Grace made over thirty-six years. …