Photography Expanded: Counter-Histories

Janneth Ballesteros Mysterious Castle, collage, 2015. Using pictures of Froebel School, a site of the 1973 student uprisings in Chicago, and made in a workshop with artist and educator Nicole Marroquin. Courtesy of Nicole Marroquin.

We’re pleased to announce Photography Expanded: Counter-Histories, a project development lab for select participants and a full-day symposium open to the public. Both events will engage with projects that challenge the status quo, question official histories, disrupt power structures embedded in archives—and explore the radical possibility of alternative narratives.

Project Development Laboratory

On April 16 and 17, sixteen photographers, artists, academics, and media professionals chosen from an open call will participate in an intensive, experimental laboratory to explore strategies for applying new digital tools to image-based stories. They are: Noor Al-Samarrai, Tomie Arai, Juan Aranguren-Romero, Roger Archibald, Sim Chi Yin, Jonathan Gardenhire, Christopher Gregory, Brendan Hoffman, Nicole Marroquin, Hector Membreno-Canales, Stephanie Mercedes, Mark Murrmann, Emily Pederson, Robert Pluma, Alice Proujansky, and Zoraida Lopez.

Jonathan Gardenhire. Untitled, (Requiem for the Price of Culture 1), 2017.

In partnership with the Brown Institute for Media and Innovation and the Fledgling Fund, this lab is a safe environment for participants to expand beyond their comfort zones, learn together about emerging platforms––such as gaming, geo-locative media, mixed reality, and immersive theater–– and how to apply them to their in-process works. Together, we’ll ask: how does an image’s meaning and reception change according to its environment or geographic position? How can we look critically at the ways in which institutions, countries, cultures, religions, and others bring order to collections of images? What happens when images are positioned as layers on top of our lived environments? And how can we use strategies of participation and interactivity to engage with social issues or promote social justice?  

Facilitators Dan Archer, Eulani Labay, Joshua McWhirter, Ziv Schneider, Corey Tegeler, and Joe Wheeler will lead activities and feedback sessions, exposing participants to a variety of tools and concepts, and inspiring their adoption, adaption, and/or reinvention. The lab is intended as an exercise for experimentation and innovation, and an opportunity for sharing and connectivity amongst a group of storytellers. Participants will come out with an awareness of the processes and mechanics to confidently articulate ideas to technologists and designers.

Symposium

On May 1, we will host a full-day symposium on the counter-histories thematic at The New School. Free and open to the public, Photography Expanded is an annual event that brings together photographers, writers, technologists, students, and other creative thinkers around new approaches to visual storytelling. 

Hector Membreno-Canales. After-Ozymandias, visualizing the remains of destroyed confederate statues.