Photoville

Sep 142018
 archive : 2018

The Importance and How To’s of Archiving Work and Legacy

Suzie Katz, president and founder of PhotoWings, and Mary Engel, president and founder of American Photography Archives Group, will discuss the importance of archiving, the best techniques and platforms, and how to start thinking about the legacy you’ll leave behind.

Presenters: Mary Engel Suzie Katz

Moderators: Julie Grahame

Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Water Street

Presented by:

  • PhotoShelter

In today’s fast-paced, digital world it’s so easy to put images into a folder and collect hundreds of hard drives. That may be the beginning of a process, but archiving your work and ensuring your legacy is preserved should be a crucial step in your workflow. Julie Grahame, consultant and creator of aCurator, will sit down with two working professionals who know the world of archiving inside and out. Suzie Katz, president and founder of PhotoWings, and Mary Engel, president and founder of American Photography Archives Group, will discuss the importance of archiving, the best techniques and platforms, and how to start thinking about the legacy you’ll leave behind.

Presenter Bios

  • Mary Engel

    Mary Engel

    Mary Engel is an award winning filmmaker, the director of the Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, (which includes her parents Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel) and the founder and president of the American Photography Archives Group, APAG.

    Engel, (for her role with APAG) is a recent recipient from the Griffin Museum of the Focus Spotlight Award in 2017. The Spotlight award is given to an organization “that consistently shines a light on photography and has created a far reaching impact in the field.”
    She has been the director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive since its inception in 1985. Engel is responsible for all aspects of running the archive including sales, licensing, marketing, legal issues, and other areas. She works with photography galleries, museums and auction houses throughout the United States and abroad. She has published four catalogs of photography.

    Engel’s first film “Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996, and screened at many other festivals. The film was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the “Outstanding Documentaries of 1996.” Her film “Morris Engel: The Independent” premiered on Turner Classic Movies in 2009. Engel is a contributing producer on the feature length documentary, “Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York” 2011.

    She has been published in The New York Times, the American Society of Media Photographers magazine, Photo District News and Film Comment. She has lectured at Harvard University, New York University, Brooklyn Historical Society, St. Louis Art Museum, the Central Park Conservancy, and has appeared at the Avon Theater, (Stamford, CT), Loews Jersey (Jersey City, NJ) Film Forum (New York, NY) Metrograph (New York, NY) Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and the Egyptian Theater (Park City, Utah).

  • Suzie Katz

    Suzie Katz

    Suzie Katz is a photographer, speaker, educator and is giving back to the world that has given her so much by creating and running an educational non-profit organization called PhotoWings. Our mission is to highlight and help facilitate the power of photography to influence the world. We help photography to be better understood, created, utilized, seen, and saved.

    Through PhotoWings she concentrates on bringing the photos, knowledge and skills around photography to the world both inside and outside the photo silo across generations, cultures, and disciplines. We recognize this wisdom honed by the world’s best visual storytellers and those who use photography are also important to others’ work and life. These ideas can be utilized for self-discovery, better communication, critical thinking, visual literacy, resilience, storytelling and understanding context among others that are also valued in social emotional learning and executive function skills. To document and more richly utilize that legacy we’ve created, along with our innovative partners,100’s of hours of interviews, presentations, and other educational content incorporating these ideas for replication, adaptation, or inspiration.

    Suzie also thinks a lot about addressing the often-under-appreciated value of photographs. To do that, however, involves saving images from being lost to the world. Pictures that may not seem important today can be deeply important later to loved ones, for multiple uses in education, and valued as history. So many photos are tossed, lost to technology in what is sometimes referred to as the “digital dark ages”, or destroyed by the elements that they’re no longer available, so an important aspect of our work is to proactively address this timely issue. As photo curator Malcolm Daniel states “Each time we lose a photograph that has power, we’ve lost the opportunity to be changed by it”.

Moderator Bios

  • Julie Grahame

    Julie Grahame

    Julie Grahame is a photography consultant and curator who has been in the industry for more than 30 years.

    In 1992, Julie moved from London to New York to run an international photo agency representing 400+ photographers. She left in 2006 and took the archive of Yousuf Karsh with her to continue clearing rights for his iconic photographs. She edits and writes as well as published aCurator magazine, and aCurator blog, which was cited both by the British Journal of Photography and LIFE in their reviews of influencers and taste-makers. For two years, Julie was associate director at ClampArt fine art gallery. She now consults and reviews work for photographers of all levels and styles. Julie also enjoys guest appearances speaking and presenting to students and hosts a workshop with NORD Photography in Inderøy, Norway.

Organizations

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