http://www.leftforum.org/ PRESENTS

1. Photojournalism and the Aesthetics of Suffering: Embedded vs Unembedded, Sympathy vs Empathy, Sunday, April 19, noon to 2 pm, Pace University, room E321.

In wars and other trouble spots 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 choices do they make? What do they consider to be their successes and failures? What challenges do they faces getting their images to the public? What do they have to say about the rest of the profession?

Panelists:
YUNGHI KIM, Korean-born American photographer, whose most recent work is a document of the remaining 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. She’s worked on the Boston Globe, and is a former member of Contact Press Images.

ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL emigrated to the US from the then Czechoslovakia in 1972. 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), Burma’s Heroin, Chernobyl, Haiti’s elections, Moscow nightlife, the war in Iraq, 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. It is the most recent of his five books.

KATE ORNE has since 2005 focused the sex trade in Pakistan. She is the first photographer allowed inside of the community of brothels, sexworkers, trafficking vicitms, pimps and clients living stigmatized under Islam. She has just returned from Pakistan where she oversaw projects she supports with the proceeds of 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. He has also covered the Rwanda genocide. 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.

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

2. Photography and the Hidden: Revealing the Socially Invisible, Sunday 10 am, Pace University, room E321.
The onslaught of images generated by our consumer culture reinforces stereotypes as it advances the agenda of our increasingly corporatized economy. Commercial image generators deliberately avoid circulating certain types of images whose truths are uncomfortable. Photographers exploring their personal histories or outside-the-mainstream identities attempt to redress this erasure. By doing so they can become gateopeners 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:
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. He’s worked for National Geographic, NY Times, Time, Life, Geo, Stern and many others, and taught at the New School, the School of Visual Arts, Sacred Heart and other universities. 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 therby 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 has exhibited in the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Artists Space, New York; Oakland Museum of California; the Smithsonian, the Anacostia Museum, the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. among others. His solo show opened at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, February 2009.

DIANE NEUMAIER (chair) teaches photography at Rutgers. Her many series include Teach Yourself Photography, Metropolitan Tits, Color Plates and Fountains & Urns. Her widely-travelled exhibition A Voice Silenced is both a tribute to her grandmother, Leonore Schwarz Neumaier, a German opera singer murdered by the Nazis, and a meditation on photography’s role in the formation of memory. Neumaier is also a writer and editor of the anthologies Cultures in Contention (Real Comet Press,1986), Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies (Temple UP, 1995) and Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography (Rutgers UP, 2004).

(category: Middle East)

3. Women’s Voices from Iran & More
Two outstanding writers, one Iranian and one American who lived in Iran, read from their works, including a memoir and a one-act play; plus Caryl Churchill’s new play “Seven Jewish Children”

Note: due to a late cancellation by one reader, we are adding a reading of Caryl Churchill’s new short play “Seven Jewish Children”—recently reviewed by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon in The Nation.

Panelists:
CHRISTIANE BIRD spent three years of early childhood in Tabriz, Iran, where her father worked as a medical doctor. A magazine editor and freelance travel writer for major publications, she has written five books, all of which involve immersion in other cultures, ranging from the music world to the Middle East. In Neither East Nor West: One Woman’s Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran, Bird revisited the country she remembered from early childhood, and received two awards from Barnes & Noble for it. While in Iran that Bird conceived of her latest book, A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan, based on travels through the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria in 2002.

EZZAT GOUSHEGIR has published four books in Farsi, including two collections of short stories The Woman, the Room and Love and And Suddenly the Leopard Cried: Woman, a collection of two plays Metamorphosis and Maryam’s Pregnancy, and Migration in the Sun, a book of poetry. Two of her plays Medea Was Born in Falluja and Now Smile were anthologized in Witness and Crawdad in 2006. Since 2004 she has been writing an ongoing memoir and a series of articles for SHAHRVAND, the Farsi-speaking magazine (print and on-line) based in Toronto. Currently she teaches literature, creative writing, and cultural studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

JOEL SIMPSON (chair), has produced the photography panels and projections for the Left Forum this year, in addition to this one. He is an activist and political/art/event photographer, curator (Sun Pictures to Mega-Pixels, 120 photographers, Brooklyn, 2007), and art critic (M Magazine, Eyemazing). He will be reading “Seven Jewish Children” along with Ms. Goushegir.

Instructions for Registration for your friends and contacts:

1. Go to www.leftforum.org>Left Forum 2009>register where you’ll see a number of registration options. Reduced rate registration is good through April 9. There is a one-day registration, if you just want to come for Sunday. Note that there are over 200 panels.

2. also on this page is a scholarship/low income option, which involves requesting a scholarship by sending an email to register@leftforum.org. See the instructions. They’re pretty indulgent about discounts, or “scholarships,” since they want to make it possible for the greatest number of people to come.

Warm regards,

Joel

Joel Simpson Photography
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Union, NJ 07083
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