MICOL HEBRON / 1 Image 1 Minute
2019
1 Image 1 Minute brought together people from the Sanpete Valley and Utah community in a unique and collaborative live event. For this event we invited 60 community members to select and discuss – for exactly and only 1 minute – a photographic image that is significant to them in some way. The images could be personal, historical, viral images from the internet – anything! – as long as it was a photographic image. Participants gave a one minute presentation about why they found this image compelling. Presentations took place in many forms- prose, spoken word, poem, performance.
The 1 Image 1 Minute event is based on a column in X-TRA magazine that Micol Hebron produced, which is a recreation of a project produced by Belgian director Agnès Varda. Varda invited various people in and outside the art world to respond to photographic images for one minute. She presented the results on French television in 1983. Hebron has produced 1 Image 1 Minute events at institutions in Miami, Utah, and Omaha, as well as five iterations of the event in Los Angeles. To date, over 500 people have participated in 1 Image 1 Minute projects.
Hebron initially employed 1 Image 1 Minute in her History of Photography classes as a way to get students of the digital age to think – for more than a fraction of a second – about an image. Hebron is interested in how the digital era has affected our relationship to images. Today we see notably more images in a single day than someone in the 19th century saw in their lifetime. Research shows that museum-goers spend an average of 4-6 seconds looking at a work of art. And users of social media make, perceive, and discard images in a second or two –dozens or hundreds of times a day. So, to think about an image for 1 minute can seem like a very long time. Conversely, when you try to winnow down your thoughts about a compelling image into 1 minute, it seems impossibly short. For Hebron, the process of choosing and writing about the image in preparation for the 1-minute presentation has been an important part of the project. She has also found that with every event, she is blown away at how compelling the presentations have been. Each image and presentation has been different, eye-opening, thought-provoking, and entertaining.
About the Fellow
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary feminist artist whose practice includes studio work, curating, writing, social media, crowd-sourcing, teaching, public-speaking, and both individual and collaborative projects. She has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1992. Hebron is an Associate Professor of Art at Chapman University; the founder/director of The Situation Room resource space for the creative community; the Gallery Tally Poster Project about gender equity in contemporary galleries; and the Digital Pasty/Gender Equity initiative for the internet. In the past she has been the Chief Curator at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; the director of the UCLA Summer Art Institute; an editorial board member at X-Tra magazine; an independent curator; a conservator at LACMA, and the co-founder of Gallery B-12 in Hollywood in the 90s. She has served on advisory boards at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Birch Creek Ranch Residency (Utah), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and UCLA. She is the founder of the LA Art Girls, and the Co-Founder of Fontbron Academy. She employs strategies of consciousness-raising, collaboration, generosity, play, and participation to support and further feminist dialogues in art and life. Hebron has presented exhibitions, performances, and lectures at numerous international institutions.