World Documents
An Exhibition of Contemporary Documentary Photography
Curated by Anthony W. Lee for the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Opens Fall 2011, National Tour to begin January 2012
Summary
"World Documents" brings together the work and ideas of eight important, thoughtful, and eloquent contemporary photographers. It presents their work as competing approaches to the practice of documentary photography, places their projects in a global setting, and meditates on the possibilities and limitations facing the socially concerned photographer today. Representing different generations and concerned with different parts of the world, the photographers who comprise the exhibition understand the role of the camera and photographic technology in strikingly varied ways. Confronted by social and cultural changes wrought by immigration and migration, post-colonialism, ethnic nationalisms, and global conflict, and also aware of the social and activist legacy of documentary photography, they each propose new purposes, and distinct styles, for the photographic document. As a group, they redefine the role documentary photography can serve today.
Contents
72 photographs, 1 video, 1 book
Catalog in DVD format
The Photographers
An Exhibition of Contemporary Documentary Photography
Curated by Anthony W. Lee for the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Opens Fall 2011, National Tour to begin January 2012
Summary
"World Documents" brings together the work and ideas of eight important, thoughtful, and eloquent contemporary photographers. It presents their work as competing approaches to the practice of documentary photography, places their projects in a global setting, and meditates on the possibilities and limitations facing the socially concerned photographer today. Representing different generations and concerned with different parts of the world, the photographers who comprise the exhibition understand the role of the camera and photographic technology in strikingly varied ways. Confronted by social and cultural changes wrought by immigration and migration, post-colonialism, ethnic nationalisms, and global conflict, and also aware of the social and activist legacy of documentary photography, they each propose new purposes, and distinct styles, for the photographic document. As a group, they redefine the role documentary photography can serve today.
Contents
72 photographs, 1 video, 1 book
Catalog in DVD format
The Photographers
Livia Corona (b. Mexico) is emerging as one of the key documentary photographers of contemporary Mexico. She focuses on the interactions of communities and the ongoing ecological, social, and cultural transformations of a postmodern, NAFTA nation. Her first book, Enanitos Torreros, was the result of a ten-year exploration of the personal and public experiences of the famous Dwarf Bullfighters. Her awards include the Sony World Photography Award in Cannes. In 2009 she was nominated for the Lucie Awards "International Photographer of the Year." Ms. Corona's photographs for this exhibition come from "Two Million Homes in Mexico," a Guggenheim-sponsored project about the ramifications of the massive effort by the Fox presidency to build low-income housing (about 2500 new homes built every day since 2000). "How are the hundreds of thousands of lives played out against a confined, singular cultural backdrop?" she asks.
Binh Danh (b. Vietnam) is concerned with the physical and psychic traumas that took place in Southeast Asia during and after the Vietnam War. Alternating between explorations of historical memory and contemporary ruin, he photographs to uncover the many modes of visual testimony, to stand and bear witness to atrocity, and by printing his images on plant material, to emphasize the fragility of photographic evidence. Only in his mid-twenties, he is quickly emerging as a key documentary photographer, and his pictures have been exhibited in dozens of solo and group shows throughout the U.S. and Japan and collected at the George Eastman House, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the De Young Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other collections. Mr. Danh's photographs for this exhibition come from "The Eclipse of Angkor," which includes daguerreotypes and his signature chlorophyll prints, and meditates on the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge.
Jason Francisco (b. USA) is a photographer, writer, and book artist. Concerned with immigration, diaspora, and the global flows of displaced peoples, his many projects have taken him to eastern and western Europe and south Asia. Several of his documentary projects tackle the problem of visualizing historical memory, including works on the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, cultural encounter in Chinese American communities, and the caste system among the Telugu in southeastern India. His acclaimed book, Far From Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory, was published by Stanford University Press in 2005. He teaches at Emory University. Mr. Francisco's photographs for this exhibition are drawn from "Strawberry Mansion," a project about the encounter between different generations of Jewish Americans living in the diaspora.
Julia Komissaroff (b. Latvia) has lived and worked in Jerusalem since 1991. Regarded as one of the most important emerging photographers in Israel today, she began her documentary career photographing Ethiopian children in the Givat-ha Matos Immigration Camp for a project on resettlement communities between 1998 and 2000, and in 2002 photographed the peace movement in Northern Ireland as a model for peace activism in the Middle East. For the last decade, she has been engaged in two large projects: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fortunes of ethnic minorities in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Her photographs have been exhibited regularly in Moscow, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Minsk, Belarus. Ms. Komissaroff's photographs for this exhibition come from "Kitab Al-Balad," a project about Palestinian street life under Israeli rule.
Pok Chi Lau (b. Hong Kong) as a young man worked in an electronics factory ("a dead-end job on the graveyard shift," he writes), and in 1969 turned to a career in documentary photography. For the past thirty years, he has followed the fortunes of Chinese immigrants and migrants in South America, Europe, and the United States. His three books, Anguish of the Innocent (1982), Dreams of the Golden Mountain (2002), and Flow China (2008), illuminate the impact of global migration on the lives of ordinary Chinese, including mixed-race peoples. His work has been shown widely in more than sixty exhibitions throughout China, France, and the United States. He is presently Professor of Design in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas. Mr. Lau's photographs for this exhibition are taken from a recent series of diptychs exploring competing conceptions of ethnic and national identity among common people both in China and abroad, a topic of broad consideration in the Chinese diaspora as China itself struggles with its Cultural Revolutionary past and capitalist future.
Ken Light (b. USA) is one of the most influential social documentary photographers working in the United States today. A professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, he is the author of In the Fields (1982), With These Hands (1986), To the Promised Land (1988), Delta Time (1995), Texas Death Row (1997), and Coal Hollow (2005). He has exhibited in more than 175 one-person and group shows, including the International Center for Photography, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco MoMA; and his pictures have appeared in newspapers and magazines in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Spain. He is a founder of the International Fund for Documentary Photography. Best known for his socially concerned work among working-class Americans, Mr. Light's photographs for this exhibition are drawn from a little-known project about child labor in India.
Paul Weinberg (b. South Africa) is one of that country's most important documentary photographers. Co-founder of Afrapix in the mid-1980s, he was instrumental in shaping the commitments of "struggle photography" during South Africa's political and street violence over apartheid. Best known for his uncompromising stand and visual portrayal of the apartheid system and of the resistance to it, he has also for the last twenty years explored the lives and cultures of African tribes as they struggle to accommodate the demands of African modernity. He is the author of many books, including Shaken Roots (1990), An End to Waiting (1994), Back to the Land (1996), In Search of the San (1997), Once We Were Hunters (2000), Durban: Impressions of an African City (2003), Traveling Light (2004), and The Moving Spirit (2006). Mr. Weinberg's photographs for this exhibition come from his most recent project on the religious cultures of the San.
Ouyang Xingkai (b. China) is little-known outside his native China, where is an esteemed documentary photographer. He was born and continues to work in Hunan province. His father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and as a young boy Ouyang was required to support the large family. He received little formal education and is mostly self-taught as a photographer. For years he has photographed the people in the ancient small city of Hongjiang along the Yangtze River, a trading town that once thrived but, like many towns along the Yangtze, has been "forgotten by history" in the large-scale Chinese shift to industrial capitalism, as he writes. Mr. Ouyang's works for this exhibition derive from his on-going Hongjiang project and include five of his signature life-size photographs.