Conversation (In-Person & Virtual)
On Political Photography: Documenting Racial Inequality in the US
In conjunction with the exhibition Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection
March 21, 2022–May 20, 2023
Join NYU Professor Lauren Walsh, author of Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter, and Professor Vanessa Charlot, an award-winning photographer and filmmaker at the University of Mississippi whose work focuses on the intersectionality of race, politics, culture and sexual/gender expression, for a conversation on the power of political photography in the contemporary moment. Inspired in part by photos on view at the Grey Art Gallery by Danny Lyon, an instrumental photographer during the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, this discussion addresses how political photography of today echoes but also innovates the photography of the latter twentieth century. Having recently witnessed the largest protests in US history—the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020—Walsh and Charlot unpack today’s evolving landscape, exploring what it means to participate in the documentation of racial inequality today and asking whether political photography remains a potent tool in an ever more crowded visual landscape.
Co-sponsored by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Department of Art History, College of Arts & Science, NYU.