The free, public event takes place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 25, in Room 116 of the O.A. Grant Humanities Building. Cassidy’s guest lecture is the first installment of this year’s Speaker Symposium Series at Tarleton’s Stephenville campus.
Since the 1990s, Cassidy has been documenting American culture through his camera lens. He has photographed goths, punks, politicians, metalheads, the Dalai Lama, scholars and oil workers, in addition to less prosaic subjects. In recent years, his projects have extended abroad to Romania, where he captured the lives of homeless orphans living in sewers; and to Egypt, where he reported on contemporary archaeological excavations.
His publications include several books on information technology as well as a regular appearance as contributing editor for Videomaker magazine. His Photo-A-Week blog (www.kylecassidy.com) was one of the first photo blogs on the Internet and has an average of more than 150,000 visitors a week, and he also maintains a relatively exciting twitter feed @kylecassidy.
In 2014, Cassidy published a photo essay on Slate.com called “This is What a Librarian Looks Like,” a montage of portraits and a tribute to librarians. It quickly became one of the most popular photo essays Slate has ever run.
Since then, Cassidy has made it his mission to remind us of how essential librarians and libraries are to our communities. His subjects are men and women of all ages, backgrounds and personal style — from pink hair and leather jackets to button-downs and blazers. In short, not necessarily what one thinks a librarian looks like. The nearly 220 librarians photographed also share their personal thoughts on what it means to be a librarian.
Cassidy’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Sunday Times of London, Marie Claire, Spin, CNN, the L.A. Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Newsweek, the New York Post and the usual list of various other publications.
His documentary photography book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes was awarded amazon.com’s “Best 100 Books of 2007” and “Best 10 Art Books of 2007” medals.War Paint: Tattoo Culture and the Armed Forces features the body art of American service men and women. In 2015 he photographed Geek Knits, written by Joan of Dark which features knitting projects modeled by geek celebrities.
Some of his viral photo essays included portraits of Occupy Wall Street protesters and the scientists behind the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
For more information about the Speaker Symposium Lecture Series and upcoming presenters, visit www.tarleton.edu/speakersymposium. For directions to Tarleton’s O.A. Grant Building and maps of the Stephenville campus, visit www.tarleton.edu/campus.
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