PHOTOGRAPHING THE MILLENIUM
Rick Dingus wanted to share with his photography students the enthusiasm for discovery that accompanies research.
Written by Scott Slemmons
Focus on the transition from the 20th century to the 21st century was, to many people, a simple matter. December 31, 2000, 11:59 p.m., was the past — a minute later, January 1, 2001, at midnight, was the future.
For Rick Dingus, M.F.A., professor of photography in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ School of Art, and the mind behind Texas Tech University’s Millennial Collection, the transition into a new century is a bit more complicated.
“Unlike a lot of projects that happened right at the turn of the millennium, which focused on the brief time frame surrounding the year 2000, this project looks at the last 50 years and the next 50 years,” Dingus says. “We’re applying an interdisciplinary strategy toward collecting materials that will be of use for reference, not only to people in the future, but also to us here and now, as we interact and think about the changes we’re going through.”
The Millennial Collection, an anthology of photographs and texts by both professional and student photographers, covers a wide range of material, all with the common theme of the ongoing changes — sometimes subtle, sometimes sudden — of contemporary life.
“The students are fascinated by the visual evidence of history that is suggested by the artifacts that people leave behind,” says Dingus, “and with the environments and contexts that surround the people, architecture, billboards, or hand-made objects that they photograph. There’s often an ironic twist in their images that challenges our expectations and invites us to reconsider what we think we know about what we are looking at.”
Beginning in early 1999 as an ongoing interdisciplinary project, the photos have been deposited in Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library and have been exhibited at Austin College and the University of Utah.
“Not only is the Millennial Collection a wonderful record of the region's distinctive landscapes and architecture, but it also acts as a personal record of residents, who otherwise, would have passed through time unnoticed, losing all of their stories, experiences and cultures with them,” says Peter Chizinski, a Texas Tech undergraduate photo student.
Dingus says the collection explores photography as an historical tool. “The Millennial Collection’s purpose is to engage history, not as something past and locked into place, but as a continuing event. The photographs look at the past in such a way that it informs our present. They also record the present for posterity so that when people in the future look at our photographs, they not only will have a sense of what happened to us, they will be encouraged to be aware of their own role in understanding history.”
The Millennial Collection currently consists of approximately 500 photographs, including 300 works by Texas Tech students. Dingus says that undergraduate contributions to the collection have been very important.
My strategy was to share with students the enthusiasm for discovery that accompanies actual research, and to do it in a manner that was relevant to the lives they were living. By offering to include the best of their work in the permanent archive of the Millennial Collection, I also found that they took my challenge seriously. As a result, the students expanded the project greatly by contributing new ideas and experimental methods, both individually and collectively.”
A Lubbock native, Jaime Tomás Aguilar, an undergraduate photo-
communications major, wanted to emphasize the Mexican-American culture. “The processes of the documentary project allowed me to dig deeper into the neighborhoods and parts of town I pass by and live in on a daily basis. The thought of the photos I made being accessible to the public for years to come and representing who I am, from my viewfinder's perspective, makes the collection special and one of the most important ways of connecting a historical reference to our place in time.”
Dingus plans to continue adding photographs to the Millennial Collection, both by professionals and by students. He also plans to expand the holdings by inviting other Texas Tech faculty, non-academic community members, and students at other colleges to participate.
“We want to see how much diversity we can accomplish within the continuity of this project during the next decade – to create an interesting variety of responses that are, nonetheless, tied together as a wide-ranging, but related, investigation of time, place and culture. We want our photographs to function as a valuable resource to encourage interaction and increase understanding within and between communities. We’re also interested in the idea that the photographs we’ve collected may one day reveal unexpected patterns and insights that we do not now see.”
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