Jonathan Torgovnik
This presentation will include a brief history of activist photography, and then a panel of committed photographers will present current projects and discuss their role as advocacy journalists.
Presenters: Brendan Bannon Jessica Dimmock Kristen Ashburn
Moderators: Michelle Bogre
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 3
Photography has always been used to advocate for social change. That tradition is robust today with the current generation of photographers who believe that activism does not end with the images. They start foundations, fund orphanages, testify at the U.N. or Congress to find solutions for the issues they photograph. This presentation will include a brief history of activist photography, and then a panel of committed photographers will present current projects and discuss their role as advocacy journalists.
Brendan Bannon, a documentary photographer based in Nairobi, is the co-creator of Daily Dispatches, an innovative visual exploration of Nairobi that unfolded in real time in April 2011.
Jessica Dimmock is an award winning activist documentary photographer and videographer, most well known for her project and book, The Ninth Floor, on the lives of a group of young heroin users.
Kristen Ashburn is an award winning photojournalist whose work, Bloodline, documents the impact of AIDS in Southern Africa. She is also one of the directors of Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project, a charity that teaches photography to orphans of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Michelle Bogre, an Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design is a documentary photographer, copyright lawyer and author of Photography As Activism: Images for Social Change, and Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century, both published by Focal Press. Her photographs and articles have been widely published in national magazines and she regularly writers about documentary and activist photography for photo blogs and on line magazines currently writes for on line magazines and photo blogs, including Photo.net. Her photographs have been featured in group shows at the Lawrence O’Brien Gallery in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and in Beauty Culture at the Annenberg Space for Photography in LA. She is working on a new book on copyright and when time allows, she is making incremental progress on a long term photographic project on family farms in America.
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