Photographers are turning their documentary images into large-scale public photography displays. The choice to mount site-specific exhibitions imbues the photographs with added layers of meaning. Who owns the space? Who is its intended audience? And who is forced to see and live with it daily?
Presenters: Nina Berman Sam Barzilay Andres Serrano
Moderators: Krystal Grow
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 5 Uplands
Photographers are turning their documentary images into large-scale public photography displays. The choice to mount site-specific exhibitions imbues the photographs with added layers of meaning. Who owns the space? Who is its intended audience? And who is forced to see and live with it daily?
From the security walls that surround a refugee camp in Jordan to the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, photographers will present case studies and discuss questions of representation, ownership, and impact. The panel will explore the production of these public art projects to the political calculus that underlies them.
Nina Berman is an American photographer who has covered the conflict in Bosnia and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. She now focuses attention on the aftermath of war and contemporary political, and social landscapes in the U.S. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at over one hundred venues worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Poland, and Dublin Contemporary (IMMA).
She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Open Society Foundations, World Press Photo, and Hasselblad, among others. She is an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and she is a member of NOOR photo agency.
Serving as United Photo Industries’ Creative Director, Sam Barzilay is also the co-founder of Photoville. Prior to founding United Photo Industries and launching the United Photo Industries Gallery, he was the Director of the New York Photo Festival. In his dual capacity as curator and festival organizer, he has had the pleasure and privilege of curating photo exhibitions and lecturing on current trends in contemporary photography as far afield as China, Greece, USA, and Japan. He has served as juror, nominator, and reviewer for the Prix Pictet, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Houston FotoFest, and the New York Photo Awards, among others.
Andres Serrano is an internationally acclaimed American artist whose work has been shown in major institutions in the United States and abroad. Serrano was born in 1950 in New York City. He attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969, where he studied painting and sculpture. Andres Serrano’s name, along with Robert Mapplethorpe’s, was at the crossroads of the 1989 Cultural Wars when Serrano’s photograph, “Piss Christ,” became the subject of a national debate on freedom of artistic expression and the public funding of controversial art. “Piss Christ”, an ethereal image of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, remains the artist’s most controversial and misunderstood work. Serrano is represented by Nathalie Obadia Gallery.
Krystal Grow is the Special Projects Producer at United Photo Industries, where she manages and coordinates exhibitions, workshops, and other public photography programs for Photoville. She is also a senior photo editor on the Global Picture Desk at Getty Images. Her writing on photography has appeared in American Photography, TIME LightBox, LIFE.com, TIME.com, WIRED, and The New York Times Lens blog.
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