College of Arts and Sciences

On this week’s episode of Segue, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s weekly radio program exploring the lives and work of the people on campus and beyond, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Dean Kevin Leonard, PhD, interviews Abbey Hepner, assistant professor in the CAS Department of Art and Design and area head of photography.

This episode of Segue airs at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 10. Listeners can tune into WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound or siue.edu/wsie.

Hepner earned a bachelor’s in psychology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Utah in 2008. She went on to the University of New Mexico where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in studio art with a minor in arts management in 2016. She is a national board member for the Society for Photographic Education. Her book, The Light at the End of History, was published in June 2021.

“Welcome to Segue, Professor Hepner,” begins Leonard. “How did you become interested in photography?”

“I did foreign exchange in high school, and I was really interested in photojournalism,” explains Hepner. “In the beginning, traveling and documenting my time abroad made me really interested in photography. It was in college that that love kind of sparked. I was majoring in psychology but spending a lot of time in the dark room. It was a really magical and meditative place, and I think that became a haven for expressing myself creatively. That’s what made me fall in love with photography.”

 “You mentioned you studied abroad in high school. Were there other experiences that led you to realize you wanted to be a photographer more than you wanted to pursue psychology?” Leonard inquires.

“I think I had a lot of self-doubt in terms of being an artist in the beginning,” Hepner says. “Commercial photography is hard to break into. Fine art photography is competitive. But I was so passionate about it, and I love talking about photography, and I love reading about it. I love making photographs, and I also love the fact that the technology is always changing, so I never feel like I know enough.

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint a particular experience that led me into that photographic career, but I think that passion just opened up opportunity after opportunity and pretty soon it was clear to me that there was nothing else I would rather do.”

 “What were you photographing in college when you were first engaged by photography?” asks Leonard.

“That was the beginning of being interested in social questions,” states Hepner. “I was studying PTSD and I worked in cognitive psychology for a long time, so some of those questions I was starting to ask in my artwork, but just brushing the surface.”

Hepner says her college mentors were pivotal in her decision to pursue photography. She goes on to talk about the questions that have guided her throughout her career.

“On a conceptual level, I’m interested in biopolitics,” Hepner explains. “I tend to make work about subjects that sit in a kind of ethical gray area – things like nuclear issues, artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical advertising, women’s medicine. I’m interested in why people believe the things that they do and what kind of world we leave behind.”

Tune in at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 10, to WSIE 88.7 The Sound to hear the entire conversation.