Endia Beal
Thomas Dworzak
Daniel Castro Garcia
Eric Gyamfi
Omar Imam
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Six photographers implementing experimental
collaborative processes into their documentary work.
Presented with Magnum Foundation as part of worldwide events celebrating Magnum Photos 70th anniversary.
Endia Beal
Thomas Dworzak
Daniel Castro Garcia
Eric Gyamfi
Omar Imam
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
06/17/17– 09/3/17
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At a time when the majority of new photography is viewed and shared through social media platforms this exhibition examines how contemporary photographers are responding to this environment by implementing more experimental collaborative processes into their documentary processes.
Over the past few years we’ve seen photographers implementing more artful conceptual, performance, writing, video and multimedia ideas into traditional documentary work. Whether this is an unconscious or conscientious response to a new media landscape more photographers are working with subjects and audience by integrating some kind of response from them into the final work. Within
this collaborative style of work we are seeing more photography where subjects are given a prominent voice or role to self-represent within the collaborations and play with the traditional power structures that exist within traditional documentary storytelling.
Opening reception
Eric Gyamfi
Eric Gyamfi was born in Ghana, West Africa. Gyamfi’s work is mainly in the medium of photography. Currently living and working in Ghana, his work consists of self-portraits, usually shot in monochrome, and various portrait series’ that comments on his country’s continual transition to modernity in the light of its traditions and customs and the people caught therein.
Project: The series “Just Like Us”
Documents queer life in his homeland and along with picture taking asks subjects and viewers many questions about sexuality: Why sexual do minorities exist? Who are they and how do they live? How different are their everyday lives? And how does that threaten mine? How similar or different are we, and in what ways do our lives and experiences intersect? How significant are our differences?
With these questions in mind, the project “Just Like Us” becomes the beginning of a journal on the lives of queer friends I call participants, and others I meet along the way who have or will possibly lend themselves over to this continuous visual record of the mundane aspects of life that exist outside of the heteronormative, yet within it. These records of their existence are a part of the cumulative history of Ghana. He also asks viewers to leave questions and commentary within the exhibition in a process moves beyond the passivity of classic exhibitions of art work in the gallery space.
Endia Beal
Endia Beal is a North Carolina based artist, who is internationally known for her photographic narratives and video testimonies that examine the personal, yet contemporary stories of marginalized communities and individuals. Beal currently serves as the Director of Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University and Associate Professor of Art.
As a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, Beal earned a dual bachelor’s degree in Art History and Studio Art. During her undergraduate studies, she attended the Studio Art Center International in Florence, Italy focusing on High Renaissance Art History and the romance languages of the Italian culture. Following graduation, Beal was one of four women nationally selected to participate in ArtTable, a program designed to promote women in the visual arts. Representing the Washington, D.C. district, she assisted in the curation of the Andy Warhol Exhibit at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of George Washington University. Beal used this experience as a platform to advocate for minority opportunities within the arts. She was instrumental in creating marketing campaigns that redefined the way minority communities interact with art. Her work experience includes, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology, and The New York Times Magazine.
In 2013, Beal graduated from Yale School of Art, with a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. While attending Yale, she created a body of work that explores the relationship of minority women within the corporate space. Her work was fully developed during the artist-in-residence program at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Beal aligns herself with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, who use stories as the vehicle to question conformity and gender norms. Beal is featured in several online editorials including NBC, BET, the Huffington Post, Slate Magazine, PDN, and the National Geographic. She also appeared in Essence and Marie
Claire Magazine. Her work has been exhibited in several institutions such as the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit, Michigan, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African- American Art + Culture based in Charlotte, NC, the Aperture Foundation of New York, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at State University of New York at New Paltz. Look forward to more work from Endia Beal as she bridges the gaps and increases our social awareness.
Project: The series “Am I What You’re Looking For?” focuses on young women of color who are transitioning from the academic world to the corporate setting, capturing their struggles and uncertainties on how to best present themselves in the professional workspace. As the young women pose in front of an office backdrop in their homes, they recall conversations during interviews. The women explain how employers would tell that their natural hair was unprofessional or their name was too difficult to pronounce, suggesting they alter themselves for the job. This project provides an in- depth investigation into the experiences and fears of being a woman of color in corporate America.
With Video:
Title: 9 to 5, 3min http://endiabeal.com/#!/videos
Thomas Dworzak
Born in 1972 and growing up in the small town of Cham in the Bavarian Forest, Thomas Dworzak very early decided to become a photographer. Early on, in high school he traveled to Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and the disintegrating Yugoslavia.
Immediately after graduating from Robert-Schuman Gymnasium, Cham (specializing in English, French and history ) he left Germany, always combining his travels and attempts to become a photographer with studying languages. Spanish in Avila, Czech in Prague, Russian in Moscow. In 1993 he ended up in Tbilisi, Georgia. Staying on until 1998.
At this time he began to discover the Caucasus, it’s conflicts (Chechnya, Karabakh, Abkhazia), people and culture which resulted in the publishing of his book, “Kavkaz” in 2010. The album combines pictures with excerpts of classic 19th century Russian literature (Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov).
Affiliated with the Paris photographic agency Wostok Press, he began to cover news, especially the Kosovo crisis in 1999, mostly on assignment for US News and World report.
Based again in Moscow since 2000 Dworzak returned to Chechnya. His dramatic pictures of the Fall of Grozny were widely published and received several awards. He also continued his exploration of the North Caucasus. Dworzak became a Magnum nominee in 2000 and a full member in 2004.
He spent the years following the 9/11 attacks covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as their impact on the US. During a several-months assignment in Afghanistan for The New Yorker, he discovered studio portraits of the Taliban. This became his first book, “Taliban”. Images taken during his many assignments in Iraq, most of which were shot for TIME Magazine, were used to create his next book: “M*A*S*H* IRAQ”.
From 2005 to 2008, as a TIME Magazine contract photographer Dworzak covered many major international news stories: Macedonia, Pakistan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Lebanon, Haiti, Chad, C.A.R., the London Attacks, Ethiopia, Iran, US presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, and the revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
During breaks from conflict areas and war zones he regularly photographed Fashion Weeks in major cities.
In 2006 Thomas photographed the New York Marathon while participating himself.
Thomas remained in Georgia after the 2008 war with Russia. This would lead to the Magnum Group project “Georgian Spring” which was a starting point for a new, several- year long engagement with the “New Georgia” under President M. Saakashvili. In 2012, Thomas photographed Nowrooz celebrations in Georgia.
Dworzak spent 2009-2010 in Afghanistan, documenting the deployment of ISAF troops and their return home. In 2009 he also visited Iran to photograph Ashura.
A National Geographic assignment on the Sochi Olympics became later the book “Beyond Sochi”.
In 2013, a commission for the Bruges Museum led him to photograph the memory of WWI. This has since become an ongoing project concerning the legacy of the First World War around the world, which he plans to finish in 2018, 100 years after the end of the conflict.
Always an avid collector, Thomas started gathering Instagram screen shots of a variety of subjects and has been grouping them together into ever-growing collections of #instagram artist scrap books.
Besides his personal stories, Thomas Dworzak continues to cover international stories, such as the DMZ in Korea, Cuba, Colombia, China, Liberia, Arab spring in Egypt, the war in Libya and most recently, the refugee crisis in Europe the November, 2015 Paris terror attacks, and 2016 US Presidential elections. Covering the heightened migration crisis in Europe since 2015 lead him to initiate the “Europa” guide for refugees.
Dworzak has also been teaching a number of workshops (Magnum, Hong Kong, Rio, Shanghai, Open Society Documentary Project, La Caixa Fotopress…).
Project: “The Guide for Refugees Europa”
“The Guide for Refugees Europa” is a collaborative and independent book, instigated by Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, is the first of its kind – intended for practical use by migrants and refugees, and as an educational tool to inform, engage, and facilitate community exchange. Written in four languages, (Arabic, Farsi, English, and French) the book offers and introduction to the motivations behind the creation of the European Union, how it developed, its current ethos, and the relevant debates that will determine its future. In the spirit of a travel guide, the book also offers “Practical Information.” This chapter highlights the major destination countries, providing basic information about the different political systems, geography, demographics, traditions, as well as typical foods and drinks, films and books of interest, and a list of institutions and organizations that provide information and service to migrants and refugees.
EUROPA is an independent non-profit project which is not available for purchase. The book has been created specifically for newly arrived migrants and refugees and the people who work with them. A print version of the book is being distributed, for free, to NGOs and people working with migrants and refugees.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Kameelah (b. 1985) is an artist-archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from East Palo Alto, CA with brief stints in Johannesburg, South Africa, Kameelah’s interdisciplinary and research intensive practice considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. Until September 2016, she will be a Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Printshop. She is also a recipient of the Triple Canopy’s 2015 NYPL Labs Commission where she is conducting archival research on early 20th-century Black religious movements through NYPL’s expansive archive. For the 2016-2017 season, she will be an artist in residence at Smack Mellon in DUMBO as well as on the faculty at SVA in New York City. You can view aphoristic text series “How to Suffer Politely (and Other Etiquette)” juxtaposed with Norman Rockwell’s “For Freedoms” in the group show For Freedoms at Jack Shainman Gallery until July 29th, 2016. In September, she will participate in the Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Upon her return, she will be preparing for several shows opening in New York and Boston in the fall of 2016 and winter of 2017.
Project: pilot initiative called On Religion: Photography in Collaboration and is working on a project about the African American religious experience. She’d probably be open to showing an early version of the project in a show. It is an online platform, so you’d need a monitor. Another project is On Refusal
The immersive installation integrates video, sound, photographs, text, objects, and reproductions of archival matter that explore her family’s syncretic religious history. Rasheed’s ongoing research-intensive practice looks at the pluralities of blackness and the interplay between legibility and opaqueness. A sprawling constellation of monochromatic textual and figurative work, On Refusal considers a collection of self- recorded street sermons as a starting point to map the histories of improvisation and religious heterodoxy among Black Americans, particularly her family. The affective space juxtaposes found photographs of worship, large-scale text works, pages from childhood religious studies books and scripture, abstract prints, looped video, and a sound installation. On Refusal does not oer a united linear narrative or resolution; rather each piece operates as a gesture toward a moment of consideration.
Omar Imam
Omar Imam is a Beirut-based, Syrian photographer and filmmaker. In his photographic works, Imam uses irony and a conceptual approach to respond to the violent situation in Syria and he often has to publish his work under a pseudonym. After leaving Damascus in late 2012, he began making fictional short films that often focus on the Syrian refugee experience. Individually and with NGOs, he has produced films, photography projects, and workshops for Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
Project: This project, “Live, Love, Refugee,” examines the mental state of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, asking how relations and dreams are affected by conflict and displacement. It is a visual evocation of the pain and desire of Syrians who struggle to survive in their new land.
The people I met are in the worst possible conditions, but they have the desire to continue being human.
I chose to make complex photographs, employing symbolism and surrealism, in an attempt to approach the psychological situation of my subjects. I wanted to disrupt the audience’s expectations of images of refugees and to present them with questions rather than answers.
For me this is the best way to express this horrible experience. It gives viewers the ability to imagine horrific and over-photographed (but under-seen) cases like the Syrian situation, where every related story is a copy of a copy of a copy. I like to surprise the audience without being aggressive, avoiding the low hanging fruit of political reaction and focus instead on a deeper human perspective.
Link: “Live, Love, Refugee”
Daniel Castro Garcia
Daniel Castro Garcia is a London based photographer and film-maker. He studied Spanish and Latin American Literature at University College London and after graduating went on to work as an Assistant Director in the UK film, commercial and music video industry. Along side this profession; Daniel developed his photography practise. Having started out as a street photographer working on personal projects his work now focuses on social documentary and portraiture.
In May 2015 Daniel started the photography project “Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016” in collaboration with John Radcliffe Studio partner Thomas Saxby, which has subsequently been made into a photo book. In December 2015 he was nominated to enter the First Book Award founded by Mack Books, a photography publishing prize established in 2012 to support emerging photographers. In May 2016 the book was shortlisted for the award and received a print run of 1000 copies, printed by Die Kuere and available to buy from Antenne Books (sold out). In October 2016, “Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016” was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award.
In January 2017 Daniel was named the winner of the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award 2017 in recognition of his work on the migrant/refugee crisis across Europe. He will subsequently be having a solo show at the TJ Boulting Gallery, London, in March 2017. This exhibition will be accompanied by a new John Radcliffe Studio publication, “Foreigner: Collected Writings 2017”.
In March 2017, Daniel was selected as a grantee by the Magnum Foundation Fund. This support will enable the continuation of his work in Sicily, Italy, documenting the refugee/migrant crisis.
Project: I Peri N’tera
Peri N’Tera is a project about the migration and refugee crisis in Europe, focusing on the narratives and experiences of unaccompanied minor though collaboration with one subject that he follows.
