A "'Photography, Power and the Ethics of Representation" panel discussion titled "Who gets to picture, narrate, position?" at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 30 will open a series of dialogues convened by scholar and arts writer M. Neelika Jayawardane of SUNY Oswego's English and creative writing program.
The series is centred around questions of photography, power and the ethics of representation, with the opening session responding to a visual economy of racial objectification. Interested attendees should register in advance for the Zoom webinar, and will receive a confirmation email with information on joining.
For the series, Jayawardane calls together a community of photographers, artists, scholars, writers and critics, whose work helps theorize, document, challenge and strategize against institutional and systemic practices of exclusion.
Some are artists whose projects have created new ways of looking at communities that have been historically (and currently) pictured through white supremacist, colonial lenses; others are writers and scholars working in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Deb Willis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Edward Said.
Speaking through and with images, they will attempt to make sense of how and why humans narrate the world in the ways they do -- always focusing on powerful structures and hegemonic cultural flows that direct how people read and make images.
In addition to Jayawardane, who also is a research associate with Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) with the University of Johannesburg, session 1 panelists include:
- Zora J Murff (assistant professor of art and photography, University of Arkansas)
- Sama Raena Alshaibi (professor, School of Art, University of Arizona)
- Aaron Turner (Center for Photographers of Color within the School of Art at the University of Arkansas; founder, Photographers of Color)
- Andrew Jackson (independent photographer and co-founder and co-director of ReFramed)
- Introduction by Amie Soudien (curator and researcher at VIAD, University of Johannesburg)
"Photography, Power and the Ethics of Representation" is presented as part of VIAD’s Reading the Moment online platform, with support from Light Work and SUNY Oswego's Institute for Global Engagement.
For more on Reading the Moment, visit www.viad.co.za.