Bending the Frame
The Wisconsin Book Festival and PhotoMidwest are excited to have the Midwest Regional Conference of the Society of Photographic Educators in Madison during this year's Festival! To kick things off, PhotoMidwest is hosting an opening lecture: Image War/Image Peace with renown photographer Fred Ritchin.
Fred Ritchin, dean of the school at the International Center for Photography, will discuss how photographic images can be used to affect positive societal changes. The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events with the hope that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Ritchin’s book, Bending the Frame, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media to impact society on which Ritchin will elaborate during his lecture.
Following the presentation, PhotoMidwest and the Society for Photographic Education will host a reception for Ritchin at Tripp Commons in the UW Memorial Union from 5-7:30. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the UW–Madison.
Fred Ritchin
Fred Ritchin is professor and associate chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and codirects the Photography and Human Rights Program at NYU with the Magnum Foundation. He also is director and cofounder of PixelPress, which works with humanitarian groups to develop visual projects dealing with social justice issues. Ritchin has written for Aperture, Le Monde, the New York Times, and the Village Voice, and authored several books, including the prescient In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990, 2000) and the more recent After Photography (2009).