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Kennedy to Kent State: Exhibition and Symposium

Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation

Exhibition: Worchester Art Museum, September 30, 2012-February 3, 2013

The Worcester Art Museum presents an exhibition of some of the most powerful American photographs of the 1960s, the images through which the country shared that dynamic period and by which it is remembered. All from the museum’s permanent collection, the images date from 1958 to 1975, and include the presidency and assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the American space program and its mission to the moon, the antiwar movement and counterculture.

Symposium: Photography, Media, and Society: the 60s and Beyond
Saturday, October 13, 8am-5:30pm
WPI Campus (Olin 107) and the Worcester Art Museum
Free and open to the public
This major symposium will explore how photography has contributed to the collective memory of the country and has influenced American identity and thought. This day-long event will examine how consumption of visual images has changed – and how that change has influenced our collective consciousness. Topics of discussion include: why and how people remember images across time and cultures; how images have been transmitted to the public and what has evolved and changed to deliver messages differently (newspaper, television, and magazines, to websites and blogs); how “images,” even imagined, have a lasting resonance in our culture; and how media moments can affect our culture.

Speakers will include:

John Louis Lucaites & Robert Hariman (co-authors of the book/blog No Caption Needed)
Judy Richardson (Former SNCC staff, historian, and filmmaker, specializing in Black History & Civil Rights Movement)
James Willis (Journalist, professor, Azusa University, Author 100 Media Moments That Changed America)
Bestor Cram (film director/producer, and member Vietnam Veterans Against the War)
Jerry Lembcke (Author The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam and Hanoi Jane)
Gallery Discussion with Matthias Waschek, WAM Director and David Acton, WAM Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography, and Curator of Kennedy to Kent State

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Peter Turnley, “La Condition Humaine”

Chelyabinsk, Russia, 1991

Marines in basic training taking part in an exercise known as the “Crucible.” Camp Pendelton, Oceanside California, 2002.

La Semana Santa. Seville, Spain, 2010

War in Iraq, near Basra, 2003.

“La Condition Humaine,” an exhibition of sixty photographs by Peter Turnley, has opened at the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.  The show provides a retrospective on Turnley’s work over several decades.  If you can’t get to Paris, you can see some of the work at websites that also offer an interview or commentary on the show.

The exhibition closes on November 3, 2012.

Photographs courtesy of Peter Turnley.

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Petrochemical America: Exhibition and Book

Petrochemical America
Photographs by Richard Misrach
Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff

Exhibition: August 25 – October 6, 2012, Aperture Foundation 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, N.Y. 10001

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of specific environmental abuses in the region, and expands into an extensively researched study of the way in which petrochemicals have permeated every facet of contemporary life in America.

What is revealed over the course of the book is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole. Misrach and Orff’s collaborative examination of Cancer Alley points to the past and into the future, implicating neighborhoods and corporate states. It also aims to participate in new thinking about how we can best divest ourselves of our addiction to petrochemicals, and to sketch the outlines of a more hopeful future.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which garnered Aperture a nomination for a 2010 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year, and won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format Aperture book On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Earlier, Aperture published Violent Legacies, which addressed, in part, the contamination of the desert due to nuclear testing. Richard Misrach’s other books include Golden Gate, released by Aperture in spring 2012, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.

Kate Orff (born in Maryland, 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.

The book can be purchased here.

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Conference/Workshop on Photography, Nature, Human Rights

Capture 2012: Photography, Nature, Human Rights

Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop at Yale

October 12-13

CALL FOR PAPERS

Photographic documentation has become a key tool in the fight for human rights and against political violence, mediating responses to global zones of distress.  Photography is often thought of as a way of disseminating evidence of human rights violations in order to call for immediate action.  Capture 2012 proposes to divert attention to another aspect of these broadly circulated images:  Human rights violations are never captured independently of their harmed environments.  At the same time, violations reported around the world are directly related to the devastation of natural resources like air, light and water, whether interpreted as catastrophic events or gradual declines.  Communities on the move after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, or North African migrants landing in the Italian island of Lampedusa, were only tenuously represented in the media in connection to the ecological crises in the background of their flight.  However, those visual representations suggest new understandings of the conditions of visibility, the environment and the relationships among them.

From another perspective, photography can be perceived as subjected to parallel environmental transformations, as in the case of smog darkening the photographic images coming from places like Linfen, China.  We hope that by linking photography to the environment and to environmental critiques, we could start a discussion that enriches the discourse on human rights as a way of sharing the world and sustaining it.  We wish to bring together challenges to the claims of human rights and critical analyses of photography.  Therefore, we intend to include images and ideas in our conversation as a way of connecting theory and practice, scholarship and art, activism and writing.

Capture 2012 invites contributions and interventions from various fields and practices such as: international law, journalism, history of art, photography, political science, geography, literature, sociology and cultural studies.

Topics of visual and/or textual presentations may include, but are not limited to:

–          Human rights and contemporary visual culture

–          Cameras and activism: theoretical and practical perspectives

–          Human rights and animal rights in dialogue

–          Nature photography and the meaning of disaster

–          The politics of earthquakes, floods, and droughts

–          Environmental sensibilities in visual communication

–          Visual representation of uclear power in contemporary media

We seek short papers (10-12 pages) or visual presentations that will advance the conversation around the issues that Capture2012 embraces.  If you wish to present your work at the conference, please send a 300 word abstract (Word format only) and a short bio no later than September 15, 2012 to capture2012.conference@gmail.com

Keynote speakers: Anne McClintock, the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Madison, and Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University and Director of Photo-Lexic International Research Group, Minerva Center, Tel Aviv University.

Capture 2012 is supported by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, the Yale Law School, and the Yale Photographic Memory Workshop.

 

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Photobook Awards: Call for Entries

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation announce The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation have joined forces to celebrate the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography by launching the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards.  Two categories have been created:
– First Photobook Prize
– Photobook of the Year Prize.

Entries will be accepted from July 15 through September 10, 2012.

A shortlist of thirty titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review, will be exhibited at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais and at Aperture Gallery in New York, and will tour to other venues to be determined.

The award winners will be announced, at Paris Photo, November 14-18, 2012.

Additional information and entry forms are available here.

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Brighton Photo Bienniel: Photography and the Politics of Space

Photoworks is excited to announce the fifth edition of the acclaimed Brighton Photo Biennial, once again bringing international and emerging photographers and artists to the city.  From October 6 through November 4, 2012, Brighton will be populated by free exhibitions, new commissions, events and interventions, at a host of established and more unusual venues across the city’s urban landscape.

You can read more about it here.

Photograph by Jason Larkin.

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Call For Papers: Visual Politics

As politics, especially electoral politics, has become more mediated, and subsequently, more digital, its visual aspects occupy center stage. However, political communication research remains relatively unfocused  where visual expression is concerned. Visual politics is often dismissed as mere spectacle, but such dismissal impedes a more thorough understanding of how political reality acts through visual representation and display.

Chapter proposals are sought for an edited volume that explores a range of political signification accomplished through visual means. Although the project is based on acknowledging  the rhetorical  aspects of the visual, proposals may represent a range of perspectives and methods. The goal of the book is to transcend the presentation of case studies and inform further research by building on theory and emphasizing the implications of case studies that may be used. While chapters that engage the 2008 and 2012 elections are desirable, broader aspects of politics are welcome as subject matter, as well.  Visual elements that might be investigated include: political cartoons, news photographs, White House photographs, nonverbal expressions by leaders and candidates, political ads, memes, and campaign symbols. Proposals should consist of a 400-500 word description of the chapter that includes the theoretical perspective to be employed or developed. A research c.v. and bio of the submitter should also be added. Preliminary inquiries are welcome. Proposals will be evaluated on the basis of scholarship and on their potential contribution to a cohesive collection. Details of chapter requirements such as length and format will be announced later.

Working Title: VISUAL POLITICS

Proposal Deadline: October 15, 2012

Chapter Deadline (projected): early 2013

 Inquires maybe addressed  to Janis.edwards@us.edu

Submit via email or hard copy to: Janis L. Edwards, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Box 870172, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0172

Photo Credit:  Evan Vucci/AP

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Exhibition: Liberty & Justice (for All)

Fovea is celebrating its 5 year anniversary with the exhibition:

Liberty and Justice (for All): A Global Photo Mosaic.

The exhibition includes photographs and personal narrative from 68 photographers from 22 countries.  It will be on view from June 9 through August 5, 2012, Fridays to Sundays, 12-6 pm, 143 Main Street, Beacon, New York.  More information is available here.

The exhibition is a tribute to Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were killed while covering the conflict in Libya last year.  Fovea is a volunteer-run 501(c)3 educational charity dedicated to promoting public understanding of world events and social issues through the works of photojournalism.

Photograph by Alex Masi from Bhopal, India, the site of the 1984 Union Carbide industrial disaster.

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Online Gallery: I Speak of Congo

Nasololi Na Congo Kinshasa/I Speak of Congo

HEAL Africa is pleased to announce the launch of ispeakofcongo.org, which intends to broaden the conversation taking place about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Too often, the country is portrayed in the mainstream western media as a country of victims and perpetrators.  This oversimplification masks the beauty, depth, and complexity of the vast and diverse country, its history, and its citizens.

Through in-depth interviews and portrait style photography, the all-Congolese staff of the HEAL Africa media team have captured a broad cross-section of society – military men, mothers, cobblers, shop keepers, tailors, farmers, and more – and given us a window into these individuals’ thoughts and perspectives on life in DR Congo, the on-going conflict there, and their hopes and dreams for their country and future.

You are invited to browse through the gallery and to return regularly to see more interviews and stories.  New content will be posted regularly with the hope that each story you read about and each person you meet in these interviews will help to expand your knowledge and understanding of the Congolese people.

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