About

Bios

Charlee Brodsky

Charlee Brodsky, a fine art documentary photographer and a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University, describes her work as dealing with social issues and beauty. In 2012 she was honored to be Pittsburgh’s Artist of the Year chosen by Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. A selection of her awards includes the Tillie Olsen Award with writer Jim Dani
els for their book, Street; an Emmy with the film team that created the documentary, Stephanie, which is based on her friend’s life with breast cancer; the Pearl of Hope award given by Sojourner House for her work with her students in the
Pittsburgh community; two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships; and most recently, she is the 2014 Honored Educator given by the Society for Photographic
Education, Mid-Atlantic Region. Two of her notable books are: I Thought I Could Fly… Portraits of Anguish, Compulsion, and Despair, a work that features her photographs and
narratives of mental illness; and, Knowing Stephanie, authored with Stephanie
Byram and J. Matesa about Ms. Byram’s life with breast cancer. Brodsky
continues her documentary projects but also has a body of work that uses her
little white dog, Max, to voice words by great thinkers.
This work is a series of artist books and prints and can be viewed at: www.thespotpress.com. You can also see her other work at: www.charleebrodsky.com.

Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels’ fourteenth book of poems, Birth Marks, was published by BOA Editions in 2013 and was selected as a Michigan Notable Book, winner of the Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award, and received the Gold Medal in Poetry in the Independent Publish
er Book Awards. His fifth book of short fiction, Eight Mile High, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2014 and also was selected as a Michigan Notable Book and was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. In 2010, he wrote and produced the independent film “Mr. Pleasant,” his third produced screenplay, which appeared in a number of film festivals across the country, and From Milltown to Malltown (a collaborative book with photographs of Homestead, PA, by Charlee Brodsky), was published. His poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac,” in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 anthologies, and
Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series. His poem “Factory Love” is displayed on the roof of a race car. He has received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, the Tillie Olsen Prize (f
or his book with Charlee Brodsky, Street), the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. A native of Detroit, Daniels is a graduate of Alma College and Bowling Green State University. He is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Collaboration

For at least a dozen years, photographer Charlee Brodsky and poet Jim Daniels have worked together to document the industrial and post-industrial landscapes in and around Pittsburgh. Many of these photo/poem combinations have been published in literary journals, and they have been collected in two books, Street, Bottom Dog Press, 2005, which won the Tillie Olsen Prize from the Working-Class Studies Association and From Milltown to Malltown, Marick Press, 2011 which was also exhibited at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in 2005. The exhibition here, at Robert Morris University, is the first to show work from all of their collaborative projects.

Brodsky’s photos are often the launching point in the creative process. Daniels creates poems that interact with and play off of the photos. We aim to penetrate surfaces to capture the stories underneath. Using the photographer’s eye and the writer’s eye, we create words with pictures, and pictures with words, and, ultimately, shape those visions around an emotional core. Shape is the key word, for both writers and photographers use shape on many levels.

The novelist, Ian McEwan wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” We try to create empathy through the interplay of image and text in a way that would be difficult to achieve in a single medium. The interplay of words and images allows us to tell a deeper, more complex story through the imaginative leaps that take place in the process. Feeding off of the creative energy and inspiration of each other’s work is what drives us.