Photoville

Sep 152017
 archive : 2017

A Conversation with Deb Willis & Brendan Wattenberg

Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis

In this conversation, Deborah Willis speaks with Brendan Wattenberg, managing editor of Aperture Magazine, about the iconic images central to Willis’s career, tracing themes of representation and beauty in historic archives, photojournalism, fashion, and fine art photography from the nineteenth century to the present.

Presenters: Dr. Deborah Willis

Moderators: Brendan Wattenberg

Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza

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Presented by:

  • PhotoShelter

Deb Willis is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. As an author and curator, her pioneering research has focused on cultural histories envisioning the black body, women, and gender. In this conversation, Willis speaks with Brendan Wattenberg, managing editor of Aperture Magazine, about the iconic images central to Willis’s career, tracing themes of representation and beauty in historic archives, photojournalism, fashion, and fine art photography from the nineteenth century to the present.

Presenter Bios

  • Dr. Deborah Willis

    Dr. Deborah Willis

     Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute of African American Affairs.

    She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Dr. Willis’ curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments” in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, and “Free as They Want to Be: Artists Committed to Memory” at FotoFocus.

    Dr. Willis was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Fellow. She was the Robert Mapplethorpe Photographer in Residence of the American Academy in Rome and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022, was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art, and taught her Master Class titled Home, Reimagining Interiority at Anderson Ranch in 2023.

Moderator Bios

  • Brendan Wattenberg

    Brendan Wattenberg

    Brendan Wattenberg is the managing editor of Aperture magazine and is the former director of exhibitions at The Walther Collection in New York. He has contributed essays and interviews to NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Another Africa, Contemporary And, and Aperture’s PhotoBook Review, and is the editor of the photobooks “François-Xavier Gbré: The Past is a Foreign Country” and “Samuel Fosso: The Spectacle of the Body”. Wattenberg holds a BA in English from Haverford College and an MA in Africana Studies from New York University. He has served on the jury for the Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2016) and the Changjiang International Photography and Video Art Biennale in Chongqing, China (2017).

Organizations

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