Mirror with a Memory celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography and Imaging (DPI) with an exhibition of work by faculty and staff from the past four decades. Founded in 1982 by Professor Thomas Drysdale, DPI represents a diverse faculty and staff with vibrant art practices and scholarly pursuits.

Describing the practice of photography in 1859, poet and medical professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., called the new medium “the mirror with a memory.” Today, almost 200 years after its inception, we see the varied nature of photography through the work of our exhibitors.

Themes include the climate crisis, the fragility of truth, human rights, feminism, beauty, identity, perception, memory, and reflections on the medium itself.

Department Chair Dr. Deborah Willis and I thank the participating artists whose work and teaching have been greatly influential to our students and community.

Our sincere gratitude goes to Founding Chair and Professor Thomas Drysdale and DPI Professor Paul Owen, both retired in 2020, for their inspired leadership and immeasurable impact. We also extend special thanks to the Dean of Tisch School of the Arts, Allyson Green, for her steadfast support through the years.

 

About the Artists

Cheryl Yun is a visual artist currently residing in Connecticut.

Her work has been seen in exhibitions at dm Contemporary, NY, Bergdoff Goodman windows, New York, Katonah Museum of Art, New York and the Michael Kohler Art Center, WI She has show in galleries including Rhona Hoffman, Chicago and Roebling hall, New York and internationally at the New Benaki Museum, Greece. Yun has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times and the Village Voice and various major art publications including Art in America, Art on Paper, and Flash Art.

“Continuing my interest in objects that embody conflict I created a series of 3D objects rendered from media images of tragedy and catastrophe found online. Focusing on images that involve water and the resulting conflict that surround this absolute necessity. From refugees fleeing a war torn country via boat to glaciers melting and flooding to our global plastic crisis. From each image I have chosen a part of the frame to isolate and render using software that builds a mesh from a relatively low-res 2D image. I am interested in the veracity of the found image in creating a new form, one that can carry the “weight” of the event. The result is scaled up to create a sculpture that is more representative of the photograph than the actual object. Resolution, focus, depth of field as well as scale, size and shape all become modes of transformation and add to the conceptual nature of the project.”

 

Michael Martone started Photography and dark room printing in 1953. He is the author of a monograph Dark Light ,Lustrum Press NY 1973 has exhibited his work often as “Unique Prints” at MoMa, The Fogg musuem and at the Howard Greenberg Gallery The Marlboro Gallery , Ricco-Maresca ,Agathe Gaillard. He was a Artist In Residence lecturer at NYU Tisch Photo dept. and also exhibited a solo show there Manipulated Prints 1959-1984 in 1984.

“A few photographers from the old school of making photography difficult are still here, myself included…”

 

Mashael Alsaie is a multimedia artist and photographer from Bahrain. Her research-based work confronts the nuanced narratives of the GCC and the history of regional representation in visual culture via personal and collective mythologies. Using photography, moving image, and installation, Alsaie weaves together thematic research and personal and historical archives to explore narratives that reflect critical discourse on femininity, ritual, and representation. Alsaie’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Warehouse421 (2021), Misk Riyadh (2020), and PS122 New York (2019). She has been an Artist in Residence at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn (2020), Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation in partnership with RISD in Abudhabi (2021), Samt Alternative Art School (2022), and Elsur Mexico City (2022).

“Adhari Spring is one of Bahrain’s most prominent folkloric sites and is said to have magical properties. I investigate one of the many fables on the spring’s origin which continues to pervade collective memory. After having been (implicitly) sexually violated a virgin’s tears alchemize into a magical water source. After visiting the site of Adhari spring in 2022, to find it a drained pool inaccessible to the public, I was struck by the disturbing distance to the myth of the site. False Tears I, considers the tear as a pseudo-artifact. Treading mythology and memory, the series builds a critical lens through which to view folklore.”

 

Jon Kline is a photographer working in both traditional and digital forms of imaging and time-based projects. He has had recent residencies at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, Anderson Ranch in Colorado, and Baja California, Mexico. In 2006, he received his first fellowship from the American Scandinavian Foundation for work in the Norwegian Arctic and has also received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Grant and an Earthwatch Fellowship in Hungary. His work is in the collections of Princeton University Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the National Park Service at Ellis Island, among others. He has been a member of the faculty at the Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, from 1986-2009, and has also taught at the International Center of Photography, New York. BFA, San Francisco Art Institute; MFA, Rochester Institute of Technology. Kline has been teaching photography full time at Bennington College in Vermont since 1998.

“This photograph of condensation is from a series which includes smoke, dust, flames, and air colonies in water. They provide a timeless, placeless field upon which to scrutinize impermanence and the ephemeral. I’m interested in harnessing the optical exactitude of the large format camera to record events at the edge of visibility and consciousness.”

 

Sean Fader is currently an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Photography and Imaging. Sean Fader received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and his BFA from the New School in New York City. Fader is represented by Denny Dimin Gallery in New York City and Hong Kong. Fader is also a collective member of Antenna in New Orleans, where he had his most recent solo show, Insufficient Memory. Fader’s work was recents included in Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Albright -Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY, and Peep Show at Anton Kern Gallery in New York City. His most recent solo show at Denny Dimin Gallery in Tribecca, THIRST/TRAP, was created with the support of a Skau Music and Arts Grant from Tulane University. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Dubai, Canada, Mexico, and England. His exhibition history includes Contemporary Performance at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa (2019), On the Map at Denny Dimin Gallery Hong Kong (2019), 365 Profile Pics at the SPRING/BREAK Art show with Denny Dimin Gallery in NYC (2017), Picture Yourself: Selfies, Cellphones, and the Digital Age at the College of Wooster Art Museum (2016), Drama Queer: seducing social change at the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver (2016), and White Boys, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan at Haverford College. Fader was named a NYFA Fellow in 2013 and A Blade of Grass Fellow for 2012-2013, and he received Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Award for Emerging Photographers in 2012. Fader has been awarded prestigious residencies at Art Omi, Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, Yaddo, Stove Works, and The Wassaic Project. He has received press coverage in MOMUS, Hyperallergic, British Journal of Photography, Art F City, Humble Arts Foundation, the Huffington Post, WWD, and Slate.

“Insufficient Memory focuses on the years 1999/2000, just after Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder and President Clinton’s State of the Union address calling for legislation to respond to hate crimes committed against queer people (a bill would not be signed until 2009). These years also promised progress in digital spaces with the advent of the Sony Digital Mavica, the first commercially successful camera that entered the market. After finding a Mavica camera in 2018, I drove 25,000 miles to 38 states where queer people were murdered in these same years, 1999 and 2000. Using the digital technology of the time, the Mavica camera, I photographed and memorialized these sites. Since local queer newspapers were not digitized and local news outlets uninterested in these victims, many of their stories were difficult to research. There were often no narratives, only scraps of information in various newspapers or police blotters. Upon returning home, I created this Google Earth Interactive Tour that can easily be accessed with the tiny URL http://bit.ly/insufficentmemory. This is meant to allow anyone on the internet to travel across the country virtually, view the photographs I made from each site, and learn the stories of each of these murdered queer people.”

 

Snow Yunxue Fu is a New Media Artist, Curator, and Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Using topographical computer-rendered images and installations, her practice merges historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime. Working with post-photographic imaging technologies such as 3D Simulation, AR, XR, and the Metaverse, her practice echoes the investigations of historical Chinese and Western painters who peered into our capacity to experience the sublime in nature. With a background in traditional Chinese and Western abstract painting, Fu saw her transition a decade ago into new media as a natural extension of her technical and conceptual research. As a female Chinese American immigrant, she lives an international dialogue and a felt betweenness, through which she investigates our shared humanity through the lens of technology.

“Working primarily with 3D software in a post-photographic framework, Fu creates scenes of experimental abstraction that translate the concept of liminality into the digital experience. The word liminal is often used to discuss the sublime within digital space and the VR experience, conjuring up notions of time, space, and perception, and echoing the experience of the sublime in nature. The term is borrowed from the field of anthropology, as anthropologist Victor Turner described as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage,” which “serves not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences.” Fu’s work draws parallels between the physical, virtual, metaphysical, and multi-dimensional, setting the viewer in a liminal space at the threshold of each in what Turner called “a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms.” Digital space and the VR experience is what Turner would later make a distinction for as a liminoid experience, differing from the liminal in that the liminal engages in an experience out of our control, while the liminoid is a choice, often relating to play. Liminoid, then, is a simulation of the liminal, as the techno sublime experienced through digital space is a simulation of the sublime in nature. Within a digital space, we are offered an encounter to reflect on our response to the simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming artifice of the techno-sublime.”

 

Geraldine Erman
Birth: 1953. Currently based in Brookyn, NY.
Education: B.F.A.: Wayne State University, M.F.A.: Cranbrook Academy of Art
Selected Awards: P.S.1 Studio Residency, N.E.A., Tiffany Foundation, Pollock-Krasner, Massachusetts Arts Council (1985,1988),
American Academy in Rome Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture.
Selected Solo Exhibitions: Harvard Graduate School of Design, Wheaton College, Kingsborough College, White Columns, Sculpture Center
Selected Teaching: CCNY/CUNY, Rhode Island School of Design, N.Y.U., M.I.T., Bard College.

“SCROLL is a 3D digital animation inspired by imagery from Japanese popular culture and informed by my earlier work in sculpture. The forms are my hybrid interpretations of various Japanese yokai ( ‘yokai : “strange apparition”, are a class of shape-shifting, mischievous entities or spirits in Japanese folklore’ ) and kokeshi (simple wooden dolls).”

 

Yelaine Rodriguez (b.1990) is an AfroDominicanYork artistic scholar, educator, independent curator, cultural organizer, and writer who merges her creative language and academic research within her practice. As a visual artist, Rodriguez conceptualizes wearable art, sculptures, and site-specific installations drawing connections between her research on Black cultures in the Caribbean and the United States. She received her BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design | The New School (2013) and her MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Museum Studies from New York University (2021). She is currently an Adjunct Instructor at The New School and NYU.

Rodriguez’s curatorial projects include “Radical Elegance” at Longwood Art Gallery At Hostos (2021), “Afro Syncretic” at NYU (2019-2020), “Resistance, Roots, & Truth” at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (2018), and “(under)REPRESENT(ed)” at Parsons School of Design | The New School (2017). From (2015 – to 2018), Rodriguez founded La Lucha: Dominican Republic and Haiti, One Island, an art collective exploring Dominican-Haitian relations through exhibitions, artist panels, and interactive conferences. Residencies include the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (2017), Wave Hill Van Lier Fellowship (2018), The Latinx Project Curatorial Fellowship at NYU (2019), and Bronx Museum AIM Program (2020).

Rodriguez has exhibited in various venues internationally, such as ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s (NY) first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, Photoville, Mexic-Arte Museum, American Museum of Natural History, and Wave Hill in the United States, El Centro Cultural de España and Centro León Biennial XXVII in the Dominican Republic, SurGallery & Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Canada, Wereldmuseum in The Netherlands, and La Escocesa in Barcelona, Spain. Rodriguez’s works feature in CNN, Artsy, EnFoco, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Aperture, and Elle Magazine. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews and academic journals like Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture.

“Inspired by the orisha of fertility, Oshun is represented wearing a bright yellow dress with a handwoven cape composed of indigo blue threads that mimic the Atlantic Ocean. Through textile, performance, video, and photography, the project exposes scars brought forward from slavery shown through brown threads woven into the fabric yet indicate a powerful message of strength and resiliency of Black womxn who have endured a life of struggle and endurance. Conceived in 2020, through the support of Dr. Deborah Willis, NYU Tisch & Park Ave Armory, which marked the centennial of the 19th Amendment, this project represents a moment in history. Rodriguez explains, “We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors that paved the way and pass the baton forward… so that we may continue to carry the message onward…” as she describes the project, that represents when Congress ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920, giving only white American women the right to vote, even though the battle was won by suffragists of all races and backgrounds. The artist sees the Suffragette movement as an ongoing battle, for it would be decades after the declaration of the 19th Amendment for women of colour to be allowed to vote. She follows the struggle within Afro spirituality, cultural traditions, Afro-futuristic imagery, and nature to represent the diaspora she is part of and merges its multiplicity with contemporary meaning. As she decides to honor Black womxn such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary Church Terrell, among others, who participated in the movement, despite a backdrop of cruelty and intimidation, Rodriguez offers spaces of commemoration and spirituality where pain and violence permeate. This work is a quest for healing in the sounds, songs, images, traditions, and landscapes that surround her creations.”

 

M. Jacob Watkins is an eclectic artist. While working mostly works in the photographic medium.
They enjoy branching out to other digital fields including, projections, audio works, video, and automation. He also enjoys experimenting with alternative ways of bringing their digital works into the physical world.

“Anxiety is hard to express or explain in words. So I’ve shown how I have perceived it in my own life to bring understanding to some and solace to others.”

 

Diana McClure is an artist, photographer, writer and cultural producer based in Brooklyn, New York. Diana’s visual work has been featured in a variety of spaces, including: African American Museum Philadelphia , Edge Zones Miami, Judy Chicago’s Envisioning the Future project, and the Andrew Freedman Home among others. Her work is also in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture and The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. Diana’s art writing — essays, features, reviews and profiles — have appeared in the NYTimes.com, The Brooklyn Rail, Art21, Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Art Basel magazine, Photograph, The Photo Review, Afropunk, Cultured, exhibition catalogs, artist monographs and university publications among others. In 2016 Diana joined the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts as an adjunct faculty member. She received a Master of Arts in Sociology from The New School for Social Research where she was a recipient of the Diamond Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Columbia University. Diana has also received grants from the Mellon Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Abhaya Yoga Foundation. She is also a former florist.

“Diana McClure works within a lexicon of motifs culled from horticulture, floriculture, nature, history, philosophy, astrology and metaphysics. She is interested in the sensory and intuitive translation of perception and energy into visual/material form. She uses both analog and digital tools of photography, while also working in collage and painting. The content in her work explores the organization of energy, the relationship between matter and frequency (the beginning and the end points of materialization), and form as a container for psychological, spiritual and emotional meandering. Ultimately, her work is rooted in lived experience, the present moment and ongoing investigations into the nature of existence.”

 

Elizabeth Kilroy is a visual storyteller and creative technologist who has produced multiple interactive projects, both as personal art projects and for clients, including Magnum. She produced and ran two sold-out Hack the Photo events at ICP in 2017 and 2018, introducing photographers to the power of code. She explores work from web based immersive storytelling to audio landscapes, from filmmaking to photography, and from books to zines. She is a founding member of Image Café, a participatory community and salon for visual storytellers, multimedia artists, filmmakers, writers, editors, and creative technologists who hope to make a difference in the world.

Her work as a curator includes real time curation for Charlotte Cotton’s Public, Private, Secret at ICP and her essay on the subject is published in the book, Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self. She has curated a variety of photography and digital media shows around NYC.

She is the Founding Chair Emerita of the New Media Narratives program at The International Center of Photography, NY. She is an adjunct Professor Photography and Imaging (DPI) in Tisch School of the Arts at New York and MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media program at School of Visual Arts, NY. Prior teaching experience includes, ITP NYU (Graduate), CUNY and Temple University, PA and the Magnum/NYU Summer Human Rights Program. Her students expand the role of photography as a collaborative process, creating art and telling stories using a variety of new tools, platforms and opportunities for engagement.

“The Baths This video is an exploration of a series of AI generated images inspired by a visual exploration of the former Dun Laoighaire swimming baths, which closed in 1997. AI Art is a new technology that uses “prompt creativity” allowing a neural network to transform a text phrase into an artwork. This in turn is transforming our understanding of creative thinking. The thought (the prompt) that goes into the image request leads to the creative act and aesthetic expression. What happens beyond the frame? What is real? What is a visualized dream? Some of these images can be very realistic. A subset of AI generated images or deepfakes can challenge our understanding of what is real. Truth itself becomes elusive, because we can no longer be sure of what is real and what is not. The original project entitled The Corner of Scotsman’s Bay is browser-based, interactive, mixed-media experience, inviting visitors to contemplate a layering and compression of time, space and place of the former baths. You can find the original project at: thebaths.org @cornerofscotsmansbay”

 

Gesche Würfel is an artist and Visiting Arts Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), and a diploma in Spatial Planning from the Technical University Dortmund (Germany).

Her work has been exhibited, published, and awarded internationally. Exhibition venues include the Tate Modern (UK); the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (D); the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, NC (USA); the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (USA); the Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art, London (UK); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MA, (USA); the Singapore International Photography Festival (SG).

Würfel is the author of Basement Sanctuaries (Schilt Publishing 2014). She is a recipient of grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Puffin Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), among others. Collecting institutions are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum, MA (USA) and the Portland Museum of Art, OR (USA). Würfel is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery.

““When Trees Are Dying” explores the effects of human-made climate change on forests. Forests are major carbon sinks and remain one of the most critical ecosystems to preserve covering 31% of the globe’s land surface. Not only are forests important for biodiversity, but also for water and oxygen supply, food production, providing livelihoods, and mitigating climate change among others. However, deforestation and degradation continue at alarming rates which alongside increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increasing average and extreme temperatures across the globe. Depending on their geographic location, trees face a variety of climate change impacts from rising temperatures to drought, fires, invasive pests, flooding, storms, sea level rise, or saltwater intrusion. Using 4×5 film and a large format camera, I photographed forests in two U.S. states and climate zones (North Carolina and Massachusetts) to show these impacts of global warming. I used specific photographic processes to represent each impact. For example, I invoke warming through solarizing prints in the darkroom; drought with solarized prints roasted in a kiln; sea level rise by mirroring gelatin silver prints; saltwater intrusion by adding sea salt from the North Carolina coast. Photography creates a plethora of carbon emissions such as traveling to locations, shipping, supplies such as paper and darkroom chemicals among others. I tried to stay local as much as possible to emit as little carbon as possible. The first part of the project was photographed in Massachusetts while I was attending a residency at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and while a visiting researcher at Harvard Forest in 2019. The carbon emissions created with this project were offset through www.carbonfootprint.com.”

 

Nichole Frocheur earned her BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography in 1999 and her MFA in Photography from The University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2001. Her photography delves into the personal, exploring memory and experience, familial relationships, the blending of cultures and identities, and the universal search for home. She has been using the nineteenth century process of wet-collodion on glass since 1998, and has given workshops on the process at the International Center of Photography, Parsons School of Design, RISD and Bennington College. Nichole has been teaching at Tisch since 2005. She was an artist-in-residence at the Visual Studies Workshop and chashama. Her work was featured in the photographic journal, Nueva Luz, published by En Foco, Inc. She is a fellowship recipient of the Urban Artists Initiative/New York City. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Oualie Art, The Flux Factory, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Galerie Camille duBourg.

“The shape of the present looks like this:

A hiding lump under twisted covers

Bird cards, plastic eggs and food tokens scattered on the living room carpet for days

The bark of a tree trunk with deep furrows

No beginning, no end

Floppy, full of holes, ragged and stained

Empty spaces that sometimes get filled

Overflowing

A glow, emanating light in the daylight and in

the darkness

Rubbing cream into swollen, itchy, red

mosquito bites

Your skin, hot by half a degree

It can stretch across oceans, bend to the

curve of the earth and reach out through

the invisible

Your soft breathing at night, and the creaking

of the wood floor from my careful steps

We are wrapped together

Made into one for a brief moment

Warm hands, small hands, grubby hands

The smell of your sweaty hair

Bodies growing longer

Teeth falling out

My beautiful ones

Soft and perfect, strong and curious,

the expanse of your being is endless

So much bigger than me.”

Kira Joy Williams (she/they) is an artist, storyteller, and community builder based in Brooklyn, NY on occupied Lenape land. Kira strives to contribute positively and generatively to existing visual representation of Black people in the U.S. by creating archival materials in collaboration with the very people being represented. Through portraiture and interviews with participants, she explores the ways members of the African diaspora make home in the face of systemic disempowerment and pervasive racism. Along with concepts of diasporic home, Kira’s art explores notions of safety, community, and belonging through visual media and stories. Her photographs and recorded histories exist in the wake of longstanding memory-work traditions that make sense of the present and construct a new future–one in which we all belong. Intrigued with what academic and author Tina M. Campt calls in her book /Image Matters/ the “sticky residue of memory and history” emanating from photographs, and the myriad ways in which photographs affect people, Kira engages with image-making to explore truth, collaboration, and new ways to care. Kira is currently a member of Black Women Photographers. She believes wholeheartedly in the power of art, abundance, and mutual aid, and in her plant babies.

“/Sheila at home/ is part of a series of portraits of Black residents of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn that I began making in 2021. Sheila is, among many things, a dancer, a grandmother, at once an independent soul and family-oriented, and has been a resident of her block since 1985. Titled “Home is in the Stories,” the full project is an archive comprising portraits of and oral histories from participants. Recorded interviews in which participants discuss their experiences of home accompany photographs of them both at home and within the community. In this living archive, historically underrepresented people are amplified and empowered to choose how their record is kept. I am driven by the importance of building a record for the future so Black people’s experiences cannot be erased. The very process of making art and telling stories can be (and has been) a safe space in which Black people can remember, reimagine, and see and be seen sans veil. In September 2022, I brought the archive to the public in the form of an outdoor art installation. Located in a community garden in Bed Stuy, the archive is accessible to community members to see themselves and their neighbors, foster connections, share stories of the past, and dream of a new future together. The installation will be available digitally at the end of September 2022 at kirajoywilliams.com.

 

Len Jenshel is one of America’s foremost landscape photographers, exploring beauty, boundary and the control of nature for nearly 50 years.

He has received numerous fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, and grants from the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and two grants from the National Geographic Society.

He has published numerous monographs, including Travels in the American West (Smithsonian, 1992), and with his wife, Diane Cook, HOT SPOTS: America’s Volcanic Landscape (Bulfinch Press, 1996), Aquarium (Aperture, 2003), and their latest book, Wise Trees (Abrams, 2017).

His photographs have been exhibited internationally in one-person shows at the Yokohama Museum in Japan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography in New York City, to name a few. His work is represented in over one hundred museums and major collections worldwide.

Jenshel and Cook have been contributing photographers to National Geographic Magazine for more than 20 years – where they have worked on over ten features. They have also published features and portfolios of their work in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, Audubon, Fortune, Bloomberg, Forbes, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, Sophisticated Traveler, GEO, Departures, Esquire, and many others.

“This project, and the book, “Travels in the American West” (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) explores the two great American obsessions with landscape – the romance of the wild frontier and the need to conquer and control that very same wilderness. This survey explores the effects of the automobile, tourism, and development on the landscape, and how it is punctuated by the great myth of the American West. This work (funded by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Graham Foundation) is about traveling the roads and open spaces of the western states – and contrasting the junction of nature and tourism. In doing so, we get a contemporary picture of civilization and culture – myth and icon. I have explored the surreal quality and haunting strangeness of these places by car and foot, uncovering human artifacts and tire tracks like an archaeologist. In the spirit of the first voyagers who traveled by mule train to bring back the photographs that established the first National Parks, this project celebrates all who have passed through before – by stagecoach, RV, and the family car.”

 

Kalila Ain Abdur-Razzaq (b.1998) is a visual artist working predominantly in oil, watercolor and collage. She began her formal art education at the High School of Art & Design and the Art Students League of New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree in painting and art history from SUNY Purchase and studied fresco restoration at Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, Italy. With friends and family as subjects, Kalila builds compositions that realize a luminous and stellar existence. Using intimacy, spirituality, and religious iconography she emphasizes sources of reconnection succeeding fragmentation. Kalila Ain holds two permanent installations at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City, her painting The Reneissance Woman resides in the permanent collection of The Colored Girls Museum of Philadelphia, PA and she is the illustrator of upcoming children’s book ‘Life is Fine’ by Deardra Zahara Duncan.

“Kalila: girl’s name of Arabic origin meaning darling, sweetheart or beloved. ‘My Mother named me Beloved’ is a portrait of the artist and her Mother. A namesake to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, this artwork centers a mother and daughter’s unwavering and unconditional love for one another. ”

 

Barbara Weissberger was born in New Jersey, lived in San Francisco and New York, before moving to Pittsburgh where she is currently based. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous national and international residencies and fellowships including MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, Camargo and Bogliasco, and the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions. Her work has been shown at such venues as Silver Eye (solo), Pittsburgh; PS1/MoMA, LIC; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (solo), Buffalo; The Drawing Center, New York; The Mattress Factory, and Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh; ADA Gallery (solo), Richmond; Artspace New Haven (solo); Gridspace (solo), Brooklyn; DUMBO Art Center, Brooklyn; Whitespace, Atlanta; and The Missoula Art Museum. Recent collaborations include Counterpointe, Brooklyn; and Commabox v. 3 (collaborative artists’ book). She is half of the ongoing collaboration ALDRICH+WEISSBERGER. Her improvisational photographs, textile works, and soft sculptures are concerned with bodies, humor, and sensation.

“I am interested in bodies, in what it is to live in, or as, this messy, demanding, and curious form, this “frail animal body.” Legislated, mediated, fragmented, reviled, and revered, bodies are our inescapable source of pleasure, pain, good and bad behaviors, and countless individual and collective anxieties. I began as a sculptor and through collage and drawing made my way to photography. All are in play in my current series of photographic textiles and related soft sculptures: my staged photographs and casual cell phone photographs printed on fabric which I then cut, piece, and sew into shaped quilts. In my staged photographs, when I perform for the camera by covering my arm (a stand in for my whole, mortal body) with a stocking and stick various objects (such as fruit, scissors, flowers) in the stocking, I insert myself into the sphere of objects and put those objects into the sphere of bodies. This attachment blurs the line between a body and a thing. My quilts are close to but not exactly functional blankets. They lie somewhere on a continuum between sculpture, photography, drawing and collage. Their unwieldy shapes come about through sketches, and trial and error. Perhaps shapes are so closely tied to bodies that to make one is to feel your own body’s vulnerability. (Perhaps a viewer senses this in their body too. Maybe that’s why shapes are often funny.) The photographic textiles collage together image fragments from daily life and from the realm of the imaginal. ”

 

Lorie Novak’s photo-based works use various technologies of representation to explore issues of memory and transmission, presence and absence, public and private, and the shifting cultural meanings of photographs. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a NEA Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (Italy), Bogliasco Foundation, (Italy); ArtSway (England), MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at Photoville; ICP; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; and the Stanford University Art Museum. Group exhibitions include ones at the Museum of Modern Art; the Jewish Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Fotodok, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her web project collectedvisions.net, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites. She is Professor of Photography & Imaging and was Chair of the department from 1999-2006. She is the founder and director of Future Imagemakers, the department’s social practice project that offers a free digital photography workshop for NYC area high school projects taught by DPI faculty and students.
www.lorienovak.com.

“A mound of discarded slides

A mound of past lives.

The remains of an obsolete technology

A memorial to photography”

 

Carole Naggar is a writer, poet and photograp-hy historian based in New York and Paris.

“David “Chim” Seymour is one of the most celebrated photojournalists of the twentieth century. A cofounder of Magnum Photos, he covered conflicts, portrayed celebrities, and pioneered humanitarian photography while covering the plight of millions of children orphaned and abandoned after World War II. Based on archives, numerous interviews of friends and colleagues, and a comprehensive study of his contact sheets, this is the first English-language in-depth illustrated biography to appear that explores his life from his childhood in Poland to his untimely death during the 1956 War in Sinai. His friend and colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote: ‘Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag, applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart; his own was vulnerable.'”

 

Adrián Fernández studied visual arts at the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy (2004) and at the Superior Institute of Arts (2010) in Havana, Cuba. He works as an independent artist and as a professor of Documentary Photography for New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Office of Special Programs Abroad.

Early in his career he began to experiment with photographic media, in which he has developed much of his art, expanding his practice in recent years to three-dimensional installation and sculpture works.

His work is inspired by the symbolic connection established between objects, belongings, architectural forms, images or fragments of the material world that inhabit and at the same time modulate people’s daily lives. He explores their impact on the shaping of personal memory, collective history and the creation of new cultural paradigms in contemporary society.

The series “Pending Memories” is his most recent work, which expands his creative process and connects black and white documentary photography with digitally generated content. He incorporates elements of architecture and engineering software to achieve images that challenge the viewer’s perception by proposing a new imaginary reality.

Adrián Fernández has exhibited in group and solo shows in Cuba, United States, Mexico, Panama, France, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland.
His work can be found in the collections of The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 21C Museum Hotels, Perez Art Museum Miami, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana.

“The photographic project Memorias Pendientes (Pending Memories), developing since 2018, is inspired by industrial remnants, unfinished construction projects, propaganda billboards, carnival paraphernalia and abandon or forgotten monuments.

The photographs are a collection of black and white urban and rural landscapes. The center of the image is occupied by metallic structures of different scales that seem to have been abandoned. The purpose of these installations is unknown; and the camera documents with archaeological interest the sites of their locations, making us think about the possible motives that led to the existence of these constructions. The feeling of abandonment in these scenes is reinforced by the evidence of deterioration, by the way nature has penetrated them and by the notable absence of the human element. The subject does not exist; all that remains of him is the evidence of his passage in the very structure that he seems to have forgotten. The set of images generates a deep sense of strangeness, provoking the emergence of questions and a sharp visual scrutiny in every detail of the scene. The spectator questions the reality that is photographed, the veracity of its existence and the reason that gave rise to it.

All this happens precisely because we are facing a fictitious reality. Memorias Pendientes consists of a group of constructed photographs, not taken. The structures that appear as the protagonists of these images are virtually generated inspired on drawings and sketches previously created and later inserted in the photographed scenes.

My interest is not in revealing the possible message or frontal scene of the construction we see in the photograph. The side I have decided to “document” is the one that is built to support and elevate that which must be seen. I am interested, on symbolic level, in the side that usually remains unseen, that of the system or logic that supports the apparent message or final purpose of such constructions. Memorias Pendientes comments about forgotten ideals and never ending utopias, failed 20th century revolutions, social changes projects and their impact in today’s society and culture.”

 

Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media.
He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, and a CatchLight Fellow.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally in places like Ghana, Belgium, China, Ukraine and Spain. His work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Sheffield Doc Fest and the L.A. Film Festival.
He has created public art projects with organizations such as the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, The California Judicial Council and the U.S. Department of State U.S. Speakers Program. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
He also helped launch and work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative, a hospital and school based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY.

“I use the concepts of identity and community as a way to study and deconstruct ideas of beauty, value, and reciprocity. Additionally I examine how identity and community form the basis of human interactions and social systems. I scrutinize preconceived notions and stereotypes, and when, if ever, they are valid. A key point of reflection is examining how identity is both a performance as well as a set of characteristics. Furthermore, I question who controls the images and media that define people and cultures globally, domestically and locally, and what role limited notions of history play in these representations. Especially in a time that is defined by ease of access to information and user generated and disseminated media. Multi-platform storytelling is a crucial element of my work, as are community engagement and social practice. Both artistic and anthropological research further informs my creative process.

My work is grounded in HipHop culture and visual journalism, however it is interdisciplinary, using the medium best suited for each idea. I create photographs, videos, sculptures, performances, and multi-media works, all of which intend to highlight our personal investment in the identities we create for ourselves, and others. I am invested in how those identities impact our understanding and engagement, in humanity’s past, present and future.”

 

Caitlin Berrigan works as an artist and writer across video, sculpture, and text to engage with the embodied ecologies of power, politics, technology, and life worlds. Her early works addressed viruses, spatial choreographies of contagion, medicine, and care. Recent works explore poetics and queer science fiction as a world-making practice through voice, instruments, and moving images. She has been developing a speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, that blurs science with art and fiction. The episodic series centers geological agencies as transfeminist scientists cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. The work has been the subject of a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) a solo show at Art in General reviewed in Artforum (2019) and a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020). Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, Poetry Project, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Anthology Film Archives, and Ashkal Alwan, among others. Her experimental essays are published in e-flux, Georgia, MARCH International, and Duke University Press. She has received grants and residencies from the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. She is currently a candidate in the PhD-in-Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College.

“For the last few years, I have been developing a speculative worldbuilding cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, that centers upon geological and inhuman agencies as transfeminist scientists interpret volcanic activities across place and time, cooperating with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. I have been working with a practice of collaboration and improvisational performance with scientists, artists, and scholars whose real-life work pushes the limits of science and culture, to depict fictionalized versions of themselves in episodic videos. Grounded in scientific research and visits to active volcanoes, the speculative fiction explores possible presents and futures to think beyond the framework of the human.

Imaginary Explosions thus far consists of a book, two completed and two forthcoming video episodes, and installations with “communication instruments,” such as wearable amulets that play animated GIFs and tactile sonic sculptures. Episode 1 focuses on the 2010 eruption of the volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, in Iceland, when the deep time of volcanic activity interjected within the human era of global air travel. Timescales and affective embodiment shift across geological time, snail time, human time, and the rapid pace of the news media cycle. The non-fictional research of an archaeology team is woven into the narrative of the Episode 2, as the network follows signals coming from a cave at the foot of the Chaitén volcano in Chile, where hybrid spider humans have infiltrated military surveillance apparatuses. Gardens as models of worldbuilding empires and epistemologies are the subjects of the upcoming Episode 3, with the main character being the only miniature, artificial volcano to survive its own eruption from 18th century Germany.”

 

Erika deVries is a mother, artist, teacher, seeker, fairy tale reader, teller and believer based in New York’s Hudson River Valley region. For nearly two decades, Erika has been creating and relating embodied experiences across the disciplines of photography, performance, neon, video and handcraft. Her works, rendered in neon, are handwritten transcriptions dictated to her children and loved ones which crystallize the moments when language and meaning coalesce. Together with her life partner, Matt Dilling she co-founded Cygnets Way, in Kingston, NY. Cygnets Way provides interdisciplinary art & spirituality programming including; lectures, classes, workshops, healing work and screenings to activate cross pollination, center wonder and renew points of view.

“My interest in photography, storytelling and captured moments led to working with neon. How full of fortune that the word photography literally translates to “writing with light”! In the works in neon I am interested in “picture language” and a place where form, language and meaning coalesce and create a fourth poetic entity.

As I age I become increasingly aware of presence and absence, in relation to myself and others. My eye and heart are acutely attuned to these phenomena and the full of potential space opened by vulnerability. Amidst the transformations around and within me I experience glimpses that I am able to pin down. Something bright crystallizes, and these moments are the catalyst for the works in neon. Flickering, pulsing, neon, has an ineffable soul quality that is pushed further into relief through crafting the pieces in the handwriting of my children, loved ones and other people of wisdom. I have grown to love neons both/and qualities of delicacy & durability. Turned on neon faithfully signals to the universe – unplugged/off neon is full of potential promise, like an absent loved one when their presence/light is keenly missed. ”

 

Karl Peterson is a photographer who lives and works in New York City. Raised in North Carolina, He came to New York to study photography at NYU’s Tisch School of the arts in 1985. After receiving a BFA from NYU, he worked freelance for other photographers and himself for several years before finding full time employment in the department from which he graduated. Peterson was the Technical Director of the Photography and Imaging Department at NYU from 1998 until 2018. He continues to teach as an adjunct professor in the same department.

In his free time he continues to pursue his own photographic projects, design and build furniture, and craft in leather and canvas.

“When I go out to make photographs, it’s seldom with anything specific in mind. Mostly, I react to the things I see, things I find interesting in the moment, due to the content or the lighting. And I’m generally interested many disparate things, but one of them is the patterns that form naturally, and this image is an example of that.”

 

Paul T Owen, retired Associate Professor of Photography & Imaging, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, 1973 – 2021. M.A., New York University. B.F.A., Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Work included in the collection of the Bibliothe Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Museum of the City of New York; National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Chicago; Gray Art Collection, NYC; Daniel P. Witter Agricultural Museum, Syracuse, NY; NY; Fortis Collection; Pacific Telesis Collection, California; Astor Collection, England. Multimedia presentation at La MaMa E.T.C., New York, and Apple Corps Theatre, New York. Exhibitions at Certro Cultural Clavijero Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico; Galeria Le Rule, Centro Cultural El Rule, Mexico City; IMU Imagen Museo, Colima Mexico; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY; Witkin Gallery, NY; Claire Fontaine Gallery, France; Hamiltons Galleries Ltd., London; Bronx Museum, NY; Witter Museum; Fifth Wiener Internationale Biennale; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Arizona; Louis K. Meisel Gallery, NY; West Kortright Centre; Nathan Cummings Foundation, NYC. Delaware Historical Association, Delhi, NY; Foreman Gallery, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY; Grey Art Gallery; Madison Gallery, Connecticut. Photographs published in New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, Village Voice, Polaroid Newsletter for Photographic Education, American Photographer, Dance Magazine, Youth Today Magazine, New Jersey Star-Ledger, and Phoenix magazine. Books: Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections, by Abrams Press; Web site: vivaslasqueremos.net to bring attention to gender based violence. Presently working on a long-term documentary movie, Death In Mexico – Traditions of Remembrance, recording interviews and events related to traditions regarding death and remembrance in various regions of Mexico.

“Women are being murdered in Mexico at an alarming rate. 987 women and girls were murdered in the first four months of 2020, according to government data. Justifiably there has been public outrage and investigations into the killing of the 43 male students in Guerrero. Where is the equal outcry and pursuit for justice for the huge number of women being murdered every day? According to the Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero stated that femicide cases increased by 137 percent in the last five years.

For decades, Native American and Alaska Native communities have struggled with high rates of assault, abduction, and murder of women. A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence.

We Want Them Alive (Vivas Las Queremos) is a photographic project meant to bring particular attention to the violence against women taking place in Mexico and to help bring about the eradication of femicide throughout the world.

The images of Mexican women, seemingly defenseless before the camera are not portraits of individuals but symbols representing the thousands who have died violent deaths because of their gender (femicide). The women cover their faces to protect themselves and to symbolize that many are never found or counted. They are against walls symbolizing their defenseless environments and situations where they cannot escape; often the abusers are within the family.”

 

Professor Mark Jenkinson has been a professional photographer for 40 years working in editorial photography, corporate, and architectural photography.

His editorial clients include Vanity Fair, Fortune, Vogue, Men’s Journal, GQ, etc where he has photographed stories on a vast variety of subjects from criminal justice, adventure sports,
celebrity profiles and finance. His corporate clients include many Fortune 500 companies such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Emblem Health, Goldman Sachs to mention a few. He has received multiple awards for his work in editorial photography and corporate communication from the Society of Publication Designers and Graphis.

Mark has also written/photographed about 40 participatory journalism “Paper Tiger” stories for magazines in which he takes up the challenge of learning a new sport or skill and attempting to compete with professional athletes. He has raced at the US Speed Skiing, Championships, attempted to qualify for the U.S. Luge team, raced motorcycles in Baja, driven formula cars, completed the CIA’s escape and evasion course, and competed in the legendary Carrera Pan Americana roadrace.

Professor Jenkinson has been on the faculty at NYU DPI for 37 years, teaching a variety of classes including freshman foundation classes, color theory, video, advanced production techniques and professional practice. He has written three books on photography.

“This photograph is from a series entitled Lost in the U.A.E..

During my five months in the United Arab Emirates I would strike out daily in a different direction, often with no particular destination in mind. In time I would log over 10,000 kilometers in my crappy rental car; just wandering, getting stuck in the dunes, picking up hitchhikers, stopping to pet every stray camel that I saw, and trying to understand the Arab world.

And the desert…my god, the desert. Words can’t describe the beauty… That’s why I make photographs.

I have always loved getting lost. As a child I would get on my bike and just go, picking a direction and riding as far as I could for hours until summers late dusk and the song of the cicadas signaled that I finally had to find a way back home. Getting lost was my favorite adventure.

It still is.”

 

Linda Levinson taught at the Department of Photography and Imaging from 1996-2009. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally: Murray Guy, Wooster Gardens and Basilico Fine Arts (New York); Lotto Hammer Gallery and Rear Window (London); Contemporary Art Center of South Australia. She received the “ArtBulletin: Public Art Billboard Project” (given by Patrick Media and L.A.C.E., Los Angeles). The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Sydney Record are among the publications that discussed her work. It is included in the collection of Williams College Museum of Art, Athens Cultural Center, and Malo Inc.(Milan).

Currently her photographs documenting The Temenos film screenings in Arcadia, Greece can be seen in the October 2022 issue of Artforum and the November 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly.

She is a Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

“I had access to a massive library. I realized that it would be impossible for me to read even a portion of those books in my lifetime. If I held each book in my hands, I wondered if I would feel a transference of energy, a different kind of knowledge. I imagined a mystical experience emanating from each book as I made a photogram of it.

I selected books whose titles attracted me: The Writings of Anna Freud, The Sanskrit-English Dictionary, the King James Bible, Tristan Tzara’s Selected Poems. To entitle my images I have retained the names of the books and the order in which I made the prints, since the very titles of the books seemed resonate with the inner light I have culled from them.

I called the residual images “pneumatic” traces, the presence of absences. This process captures the imagination by transforming the actual objecthood of a book into a monochrome abstraction. Thus, I explore the nature of photography — as I have done in different modes, throughout my career — demonstrating that its essence is directly manifested when photography does not primarily or merely represent the way things look.”

 

Jeffrey Henson Scales is a photographer who began making photographs at age 11 after his parents, his mother a painter and his father an amateur photographer gave him 30 years of Life Magazines and a Leica camera and has since spent more than five decades as a documentary and commercial photographer. His documentary photographs have been exhibited at museums throughout the United States and Europe and have appeared in numerous photography magazines, books, and anthologies. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums throughout the United States.
He is also an award-winning photography editor who curates The New York Times, photography column, “Exposures,” and the annual Year in Pictures special section. He has been an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of The Arts, Photography & Imaging department since 2006.
His current project is digitizing and cataloging over fifty years of his personal and professional photographs which include images and narratives from his latest book, “In A Time of Panthers, The Early Photographs.”

“In 2017, when my mother died and the contents of our family home were sorted, my images of The Black Panthers in the 1960’s were discovered. Within the context of today’s national racial justice dialogues, the death of Black men and women at the hands of police and vigilantes, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. A new urgency to these images and the original Civil Rights Movement takes root in context of today’s ongoing struggle for racial justice, and these images serve as a time capsule of sorts, not only of my adolescence and political awakening, but also for the country whose ongoing struggle with racial inequality, police brutality and resistance is as urgent and timely as ever.”

 

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging (2001-present). Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers and beauty. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has exhibited her work in numerous museums and galleries and published books on photography such as Posing Beauty and Reflections in Black.

“This photograph is from my project In Pursuit of Beauty which explores the ways in which the concept of beauty is represented through the intimate space of the closet. The “closet,” as a figure of speech, can also be subverted. It can be reclaimed as an aspect of authoring our identities, and stepping into a desire to image one’s self in the world as they intend to be seen by others – contrary to social or cultural convention. This work is based on documenting the treasured items we save in the space of the closet. My work as an artist, scholar and educator is grounded in making and studying photographs that reflect personal and collective memories on beauty. As an extension, my work investigates the closet as a site where beauty is enacted through the representation of our private and public selves. This image is rooted in my practice of reimagining beauty as a radical form of self-identification.”

 

A. D. Coleman is an internationally known critic of photography and photo-based art, and a widely published commentator on new digital technologies. In 2002 he received the Culture Prize of the German
Photographic Society — the first critic of photography ever so honored. In 2010 he received the J Dudley Johnston Award from the Royal Photographic Society (U.K.) for “sustained excellence in writing about photography.” In 2014 he received the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award for lifetime contribution to the field, and in 2015 both the Society of Professional Journalists SDX Award for Research
About Journalism and The Photo Review Award “for outstanding contributions to photography, including the investigation of Robert Capa’s D-Day photographs.”

Coleman has published 8 books and more than 2500 essays on photography and related subjects. Formerly a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer, Coleman has contributed to ARTnews, Art On Paper, Technology Review, Ag (England), European Photography (Germany), La Fotografia (Spain), and Art Today (China). His work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries.

Coleman initiated the criticism and history component of the Department of Photography, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he taught from 1977-93.

Coleman’s widely read blog “Photocritic International” appears at photocritic.com. Since 2005, exhibitions that he has curated have opened at museums and galleries in Canada, China, Finland, Italy, Rumania, Slovakia, and the U.S.

 

Editha Mesina is a photographer whose work mines the various concerns of portraiture, its public and private spheres, to speak of individual and collective identities. She has exhibited in New York at the Cuchifritos Gallery, Artist Space, Clocktower Gallery, Ceres Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, as well as at the West Kortright Center, East Meredith; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Xavier University Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; and internationally in Pingyao, China and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been teaching at NYU Tisch since 1992 and is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at the Department of Photography and Imaging. Mesina is a New York Foundation for the Arts Alex G. Nason Fellow in Photography.

“Third Life/Memory and Justice appropriates portraits of murdered Filipino human rights activists and re-examines the egregious era of impunity surrounding the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos during the Philippine Martial Law period of 1972-1981.

In my reproduction of these portraits, I am commenting on the purpose and repurpose of photography. The original intention of these portraits was to honor an academic accomplishment or mark a coming-of-age milestone (first life). Their reproduction in newspapers and journals at the time of the individuals’ deaths (second life), exchanged the private use of these photographs for a more tragic public display. An everyday image from a family album suddenly became an announcement of a murder or disappearance, the evidence of a beautiful life cut short. These photographs that once shaped personal memory now contribute to a collective memory of atrocity. My appropriation of these photographs creates their third life, a life not born from nostalgia but rather born in an act of resistance. Their third life becomes a strategy to strengthen the strands that work with memory, a measure against forgetting. With the recent election of Marcos’ son, Ferdinand Jr. (nicknamed Bong-Bong) as the new president of the Philippines, it is now, more than ever, imperative to remember the violence and murders of the 1970s and ’80s. I also include an audio component of contemporary Filipina/o/x human rights defenders telling the story of young activists whose lives were cut short during Martial Law.

This work is a form of protest which communicates with an audience, reshaping and reinforcing the collective public memory of these atrocities, working against the shameful pull of historical amnesia.”

 

Jordan Corine Cruz (b. 1993) is a queer Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, photography, performance, video, and sound. Using traditional and industrial materials as cultural signifiers, Cruz creates interactive spaces and objects focusing on the intersections between self-identification, labor, gender, and displacement. Her work considers how BIPOC communities utilize nostalgia to develop strategies for survival. Cruz’s practice centers on cultural archives ranging from family lore, Puerto Rican traditional practices, and block culture.

Cruz earned a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown in Haul Gallery, SoMad Studio, La Mama Galleria, and SVA Chelsea Gallery. Cruz was granted the BRIO award by the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2020. Additionally, she has organized and hosted a panel talk focusing on Latinx Women Photographers in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Cruz lives and works in The Bronx, New York.

“When you can’t hear one, listen for the other (Coqui Coqui) is a series of site-specific sculptures made to melt in tribute to Puerto Rico. The pieces reference various dimensions of lived experience and generational memory using ephemera embedded within votive wax. As the bricks melt, an archive of complicated, messy, and beloved cultural and personal histories emerges, leaving behind a pile of debris. The resulting photographs are the final records of these objects intact and serve as a reminder of what was and could still be if given the proper conditions.”

 

Adam Ryder was born and raised in the Washington D.C metropolitan area and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in Photography, Video and Related Media and studied art history and studio arts at Clark University. Ryder’s photographic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and two-person shows and he is represented by Uprise Art.

Ryder has been the recipient of an individual artist grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, an artist residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah and a gallery fellowship from Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, D.C. His work has spanned traditional photographic methodologies and has variously explored the interrelationships between architectural praxis and science fiction set design, archival fictions and contrived classical cults of power.

He’s the author of Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey a photobook published by Conveyor Editions (2016) and winner of PDN’s 2017 Photo Annual photobook award. The book is predicated on the discovery of lost archives from an archeological expedition authored by a colonial entity operating in the Southern Levant in the early twentieth century. Ryder chronicles the story of this collective endeavor through carefully constructed black and white images, original text, and calculated slippages that challenge the authority of colonial values, the historical archive, and the photography itself.

Ryder has also co-curated photographic and new media exhibitions, including Social Media with Pace Gallery and at NutureArt in Brooklyn as part of the curatorial collective Rational Formal. He’s been a contributing writer for several publications, including Photograph, Popular Photography and American Photo, where he interviewed artists, reviewed exhibitions and covered cultural and technological trends in lens-based media.

Ryder has taught at the Community College of Rhode Island, The New York City College of Technology and has served as a thesis advisor for the MPS program in Digital Photography at the School of Visual Arts.

 

Elaine Mayes (Denver, NY) has worked in photography and film since 1960. From 1961-68 she was an independent photojournalist in San Francisco. From 1967-68, she documented the ‘Summer of Love’ in Haight Ashbury and the Monterey Pop Festival. This work resulted in her book, It Happened in Monterey. Selected recent exhibitions connected with the 50th Anniversary of that time include the deYoung Museum, San Francisco; California Historical Society, Monterey Art Museum and Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla.
Mayes’ images have appeared at MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SF MOMA, Honolulu Contemporary Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Brooklyn Museum. Among her awards are three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her newest publication is Recently, Daylight Press, 2013. Her films include “Summers with Helen” (Levitt) 2018 and contributions to “Silverlake Life,” updated in 2019. She is affiliated with Getty Images, Joseph Bellows Gallery, Morrison Hotel Galleries and the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, NY.
Mayes taught photography for over 35 years including 18 years at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She was Chair of the Tisch Photography Department from 1997 until her retirement in the year 2000.
elainemayesphoto.com

Mirror with a Memory: NYU Tisch Photography and Imaging 40th Anniversary Exhibition

Featuring: Various Artists

Curated by: Editha Mesina

Locations

ON VIEW AT: Cross 44

View Location Details Download a detailed map of this location Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza

1 Water St
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Number 1 on the official photoville map Click to download this year's map

This location is part of Brooklyn Bridge Park
Explore other locations and exhibitions nearby

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