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: Deborah Willis

Moderators: Brendan Wattenberg

Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza

Number 1 on the official photoville map

Click to download this year's map

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

  • Deborah Willis

    Deborah Willis

    Photographer Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where she teaches courses on photography, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender.

    Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation, and contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

    Willis is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and co-author of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles are NAACP Image Award Winners).

    Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: In Pursuit of Beauty: Imaging Closets in Newark and Beyond at Express Newark, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits at the International Center of Photography, and Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments at Indiana University.

    Since 2006, she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring imaging of the black body in the West, such as the conference titled Black Portraiture[s] which was held in Johannesburg in 2016. Professor Willis’s work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions domestically and abroad.

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

This website was made possible thanks to the generous support and partnership of Photowings