Fervor for Photojournalism:
Left Forum 2009 Photography Panels
by Mary Ann Lynch
(click on images to enlarge)

Left Forum 2009: “Turning Points”
April 17-19, 2009, Photography Panels Sunday April 19 Pace University (across from City Hall)
One Pace Plaza NYC, NY 10038

Have you ever wanted to immerse yourself in a think tank? Here’s your chance. Scholars, writers, artists and activists from throughout the world will convene in New York City from April 17-19, 2009 to address “the burning issues of our times” at Left Forum 2009, whose theme this year is “Turning Points.” Pace University in downtown Manhattan hosts the event and its formidable lineup of more than 200 panels and distinguished panelists. Panels take place this Saturday and Sunday, April 18 & 19.

Two photography panels organized by Joel Simpson, a New York-based critic, photographer, and curator, are scheduled back-to-back for Sunday April 19. Even in a city replete with outstanding photography programming year-round, this timely duet of panels and participants will provoke the grey matter.

 “Photography and the Hidden: Revealing the Socially Invisible” looks at photographers and works that reveal the “socially invisible” groups, issues, and histories that our consumer culture avoids. “Photographers exploring their personal histories or outside-the-mainstream identities attempt to redress this erasure. By doing so they can become gate openers to inclusiveness, reminding viewers of the richness of difference, the diversity of experience and the struggles of those in our midst, whose stories neither sell products nor offer reassurance.”
Panelists: Donna Ferrato; Mariette Pathy Allen; Hank Willis Thomas; Richard Falco. Chair: Diane Neumeier.

Ponyboy. ©Donna Ferrato

 “Photojournalism and the Aesthetics of Suffering: Embedded vs. Unembedded and Sympathy vs. Empathy” addresses the challenges confronting photojournalists working in wartime or trouble spots, including what they face in trying to get their images published. “Photojournalists must bridge the gap between victims’ suffering and viewers’ curiosity, while having to contend with spin, censorship, and, too often, flying bullets and shrapnel. How do they do it? What do they have to say about the rest of the profession?”
Panelists: Yunghi Kim; Antonin Kratochvil; Kate Orne; Anthony Suau.
Chair: Joel Simpson.

Brothels and Fundamentalism Project. ©Kate Orne
                                                           
After the panels, dive in—to exhibits, films, slide shows, and a book fair, or watch roving Paper Tiger TV producers interview conference participants on camera (maybe even you). Nightly plenaries offer a chance to “cross-pollinate” and generate ideas with participants from all corners of North America, as well as Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Even reading the conference program can raise your energy level. It’s a treasure map for the photojournalist in search of a topic and those in its matrix.

Since 9/11, a fervor’s been building among mainstream audiences for photojournalism and photography related to social change. This conference both attests to and fuels that fire. Photography, media, and the visual arts comprise a vital part of conference events and activities overall.

The more than two hundred panels are grouped according to subjects, from the economy, ecology, and the environment to art, food, gender, labor, U.S. politics, race, religion, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and more. Though the categories sound routine, the panels push the envelope. They’ll inspire, call to action, rattle your cage.

Here’s a sampling: Once More Into the Breach: Radical Film and Art; Poetry and Revolution; Left Independent Publishing Panel; Sport as a Platform for Dissent; Greed: Can an Information Age Society Afford to Indulge It?; Obama and the Audacity of Hype; Terror Incognita: Immigrants and the Homeland Security State; “Campaign to End the Death Penalty National Tour: Live From Death Row! (with a "Live call-in from a death row prisoner"); Not Our War: Afghanistan and the Challenges for the Global Peace Movement; Classy Documentaries about Class Struggle; Exposing the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline and the Systematic Destruction of Poor Black and Latino Families in New York City; The New Slavery & the Global Sex Industry: The New Abolitionists  For a complete list of panels:  http://leftforum.org/?q=2009/panels
Wheels turning?  They ought to be: Left Forum’s “Turning Points” is mega-food for thought. If you’re in the New York metropolitan area this weekend, head over to Pace or at least peruse the conference material online. Who’s to say? Left Forum 2009 could inspire a turning point for you photographically—even if your taste of it begins and ends with this article. Savor the taste.

Photography Panels
and Biographies

“Photography and the Hidden: Revealing the Socially Invisible”
Sunday April 19, 2009,
Pace University (10 am, room E321)

DIANE NEUMAIER (chair) teaches
photography at Rutgers. Her many
series include Teach Yourself
Photography, Metropolitan Tits,
Color Plates and Fountains & Urns. 
Her widely traveled exhibition, A
Voice Silenced, is a tribute to
her grandmother, Leonore Schwarz
Neumaier, a German opera singer
murdered by the Nazis. Neumaier
is also a writer, and editor of anthologies, including, Reframings:
New American Feminist Photographies 
(Temple UP, 1995) and Beyond Memory:
Soviet Nonconformist Photography 
(Rutgers UP, 2004). 

MARIETTE PATHY ALLEN’s major
photographic work documents
people who are transgender or
gender variant. Her internationally
exhibited work is in the collections
of Houston’s The Museum of Fine
Arts, The Bibliotheque Nationale in
Paris, The George Eastman House,
The Corcoran Gallery, and The
Brooklyn Museum, Sackler collection
of feminist art. Her books include
Transformations: Crossdressers
and Those Who Love Them (1989,
EP Dutton) and The Gender Frontier
(2004, Kehrer Verlag), recipient of a
Lambda Literary Award.

RICHARD FALCO, president of Vision
Project, which showcases worldwide
documentary photography and publishes
the webzine Witness. Published books: To Bear Witness/September 11 (Shangri-La, 2003) and Medics: A Documentation of Paramedics in the Harlem Community (Guignol Books, 1986). An award winner at the Society of Publication Designers, his work has been exhibited in New York and abroad. Exhibitions include: Corcoran Gallery, (Washington, DC), Here is New York: International Center of Photography, New York Historical Society (NYC), Nikon Galleries (Tokyo) & others. 

DONNA FERRATO dedicates her
photography to exploring domestic
violence and human sexual behavior,
seeing them as the paired opposites
of human intimacy. Her groundbreaking
study of domestic violence, Living with
the Enemy (Aperture) came out in 1991,
and her remarkable exploration of real-life sexual behavior, devoid of idealizations, Love and Lust (Aperture), appeared in 1994. Her personal goal is to redress the imbalance that favors male fantasies in gender relations, and thereby to enlarge the space for women’s imaginary domain.
                                                                  
HANK WILLIS THOMAS creates 2-D and digital time-based collages that examine race, class, and gender within popular culture. Winner of the first Aperture West Book Prize for Pitch Blackness (2008), he is also known for
The B(r)anded Series, based on the
language of advertising. He has exhibited
widely, atplaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Smithsonian; the Anacostia Museum; and the National Portrait Gallery; Washington, D.C., among others. His recent solo show opened at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, February 2009.

“Photojournalism and the Aesthetics of Suffering: Embedded vs. Unembedded and Sympathy vs. Empathy”
(12 noon to 2, room E321)

JOEL SIMPSON (chair) has produced the photography panels and projections for the Left Forum this year. He is an activist, political/art/event photographer, curator (“Sun Pictures to Mega-Pixels, 120 photographers,” 2007), and art critic (M Magazine, Eyemazing).

YUNGHI KIM, a Korean-born American photographer, whose recent work includes Comfort Women, Korean girls pressed into sexual service by the Japanese army during WWII. She has also done photo essays on Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan and New Orleans following Katrina. Kim has worked on the Boston Globe and is a former member of Contact Press Images.

ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL emigrated to the US in 1972, from what was then Czechoslovakia. He has become one of the most celebrated photojournalists in the business, covering such stories as “Blood Diamonds” (diamonds mined to fund wars in various parts of Africa), Haiti's elections, the wars in Eastern Europe, and celebrities such as George Clooney and Bono. He has won many awards including in 2005 the Lucie Award for photojournalism, and the Golden Light Award for best documentary book, for Vanishing (de.M0 press), which documents cultures being extinguished by human catastrophes.

KATE ORNE, for nearly ten years, has largely focused on issues surrounding women and children in developing countries. In 2005 Orne was the first photographer allowed inside of the community of brothels, sex workers, trafficking victims, pimps and clients living stigmatized lives under Islam. She has just returned from Pakistan, where she oversaw projects she supports with the proceeds from her images, including two schools for the children of sex workers and a free healthcare clinic. Orne received the Berenice Abbott Award for Photography 2008.

ANTHONY SUAU, a contract photographer for Time Magazine, won a Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of Chechnya. His 10-year project, “Beyond the Fall,” covered changes in the former Soviet Union, and was widely exhibited in Europe.His 2001 show “Between Worlds—Kabul—New York” juxtaposed images of the 9/11 aftermath with those of Kabul following the Taliban’s withdrawal (City Museum of New York). His 2004 book Fear This (Aperture) examines the efforts in the US to encourage acceptance of the war in Iraq. He received the ICP Infinity award
for photojournalism in 2007.