Chapter III: Towards a Future for Photography

Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School, serving more than 3,500 students annually in graduate, certificate, continuing education, and youth photography programs. Previously Ritchin had founded the Documentary Photography and Visual Journalism Program at the ICP School and directed it from 1983–86. He was appointed Dean in 2014 and Dean Emeritus in 2017. Immediately prior to joining ICP, Fred Ritchin was professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1991–2014, where he co-directed the NYU/Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights educational program. Ritchin has been picture editor of the New York Times Magazine (1978–82) and executive editor of Camera Arts magazine (1982–83). In 1999 he co-founded and directed PixelPress, an online publication and a collaborator on human rights initiatives with organizations such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, Rotary International, Crimes of War, and UNFPA. Ritchin has written and lectured internationally about the challenges and possibilities of the digital media revolution. He has published three books on the future of imaging: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990); After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008); and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013). In 2016 he co-authored with Carole Naggar the Magnum Photobook: The Catalogue Raisonné. He has also been curator of numerous exhibitions on subjects ranging from Latin American photography to alternative image strategies for social change. He created the first multimedia version of the New York Times in 1994–95, and the website “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace” that Ritchin made with photographer Gilles Peress for the New York Times in 1996 was subsequently nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. More recently he created the Four Corners Project (fourcornersproject.org), an innovative open-source strategy to provide more context and ethical grounding for the photograph online. In 2012 he was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Argentinian Documentary Photography Festival in Tucumán, and in 2017 he received the John Long Ethics Award from the National Press Photographers Association. In 2020 he helped to create the online publication Fotodemic.org, and at the end of that year launched TheFifthCorner.org, a resource for photographers.

Zahra Rasool is an Emmy-nominated producer, writer and media entrepreneur whose journalism, storytelling and innovation centers marginalized communities and people of color. Still Here, her most recent work about incarceration and gentrification in Harlem premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Zahra’s past experiences bear testament to her commitment to innovation and community-centered storytelling. In 2015, she founded “Gistory”, an interactive map and social platform to deliver news summaries to millennials globally. In 2016, she joined RYOT as Managing Editor and later the Huffington Post to build one of the first companies to use immersive technologies for editorial storytelling. She was recognized as a Global Media Gamechanger at the International Broadcasting Convention (2018), nominated for the Robert G. McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership (2019) and the American Express Nextgen Leadership Award (2020). In May 2017, Zahra created and launched AJ Contrast; part of Al Jazeera Media Network – one of the largest, most diverse, global operations broadcasting news to over 400 million households in more than 150 countries. Since 2017, Zahra and her team have been nominated for 31 media and film awards and have won 15 including an NABJ Award, an RTDNA Award, two Online Journalism Awards (OJA), two Webbys and one Shorty among others. Her documentaries have been screened at over 40 international film festivals including at Sundance, Sheffield DocFest and Berlinale. Outside of her homes in NYC and Mumbai, Zahra has lived in Doha, London and Chonnam in South Korea.

Samar Abu Alouf, a Palestinian photographer residing in the Gaza Strip. Its work is primarily focused in the Gaza Strip, given the issues that stem from her personal experience with gender, women and children live, and the consequences of the war. As of 2010 - 2012 - 2014, she has been working as an independent photographer, assigned freelance photographer duties by Reuters and others. Abu Alouf's main focus was on her ongoing projects, "On the Life of Women in Gaza" and "." The first around us continues to celebrate International Women's Day, this time with a series of pictures by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Alouf, presenting women in Gaza.

Olivia Arthur is known for her in-depth photography examining people and their personal and cultural identities. Much of her work has illuminated the daily lives of women living in countries as varied as Saudi Arabia, India and across Europe. A more recent focus on large format portraiture has brought her work back to the UK. “For me, part of the power of still photography is the ambiguousness of pictures, the ability to give a hint about a scene or event without being too absolute,” says Arthur of her work. Arthur was born in London and grew up in the UK. She studied mathematics at Oxford University and photojournalism at the London College of Printing. She began working as a photographer in 2003 after moving to Delhi and was based in India for two and a half years. In 2006, she left for Italy to take up a one-year residency with Fabrica, during which she began working on a series about women and cultural divides. Representation and the way we see ourselves are also areas of interest for Arthur. She explored these themes in her project In Private/Mumbai (2016-2018) about sexuality in India and through her ‘Portrait of a City’ commission about young people for Hull, City of Culture (2017). Arthur’s work has been shown in publications including The New Yorker, Vogue and TIME magazine among others and selected commercial clients include British Airways, Capeb and BNP Paribas. She has received support from the Inge Morath Award, the National Media Museum, OjodePez-PhotoEspana Award for Human Values. In 2010, she co-founded Fishbar, a publisher and space for photography in London, with Philipp Ebeling. Arthur continues to return to India and to work in London where she lives. Arthur became a full member of Magnum Photos in 2013.

Nick Bruckman is an award-winning director and the founder/CEO of People's Television, an NYC and DC-based creative studio that produces independent films and branded content for the world’s leading companies and causes.His upcoming documentary feature Not Going Quietly, executive produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, won the Audience award at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival and will be released theatrically by Greenwich Entertainment in August. He previously produced the narrative feature film Valley of Saints, shot under lockdown in Kashmir, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the AsiaAfrica Prize at the Dubai Film Festival, and was a New York Times Critics Pick. His first feature documentary La Americana, following an undocumented immigrant's journey from Bolivia, broadcast worldwide on networks including Nat Geo, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He has executive produced numerous short films, including Rosa, which won Best Short at the Woodstock Film Festival and was acquired by HBO, and Desert Mourning, which premiered at Mountainfilm Telluride. Nick has participated in numerous labs, fellowships, and markets worldwide, including the Rotterdam Producers Lab, the IFP Cannes Producers Fellowship, and the Film Independent Producers Lab. His work has received grants from foundations including the Sloan Foundation, Cinereach, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the International Documentary Association. Through People’s TV, Nick produces and directs branded video in countries around the world for clients including Airbnb, Greenpeace, Facebook, and Black Lives Matter.

Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist and filmmaker who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor with structural critique, she uses still and moving images along with testimony and archival material to examine the staging and performance of American power. Her photo books, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017) and Necessary Fictions (Radius Books, 2020) explore American “state-created realities,” from the notorious offshore War on Terror prison and its global diaspora to the domestic military sites hosting immersive, realistic wargames. Debi’s work has been profiled in Art in America, Hyperallergic, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the British Journal of Photography, Polka, and European Photography Magazine. Recent honors include a Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize nomination, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Photography, a Leica Women Foto Project Award, and a Harpo Foundation Visual Artist grant, as well as shortlists for the W. Eugene Smith Fund Memorial Grant, Tim Hetherington Trust Visionary Award and Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award. www.debicornwall.com

Thomas Dworzak was born in 1972. He grew up in the small town of Cham in the Bavarian Forest, and very early on decided to become a photographer. Still, in high school, he travelled to Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and the disintegrating Yugoslavia. Immediately after graduating, 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 discovered the Caucasus, its conflicts (Chechnya, Karabakh, Abkhazia), people and culture and decided to live in Tbilisi until 1998. In 2010 his early work was published as “Kavkaz”, combining 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, the Kosovo crisis in 1999 and returned to Chechnya. His dramatic pictures of the ‘Fall of Grozny’ in 2000 were widely published and received several awards. Dworzak became a Magnum nominee in 2000 and a full member in 2004. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, he spent time 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; these images would form his first book, “Taliban”. The images that were taken during his many assignments in Iraq, most of which were shot for TIME Magazine became 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 including 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. 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 and he spent 2009-2010 in Afghanistan, documenting the deployment of ISAF troops and their return home. A National Geographic assignment on the Sochi Olympics became later the book “Beyond Sochi”, 2014. In 2013, a commission for the Bruges Museum led him to photograph the memory of WWI. This became a several-year-long project concerning the legacy of the First World War in about 80 countries around the world which was finished in November 2018, 100 years after the end of the conflict as a “Feldpost” box of 1568 postcards with texts written by Chris Bird. Since 2011 he is also represented by Gallery Clair in Munich and St.Paul. Always an avid collector, Thomas started gathering Instagram screenshots of a variety of subjects and has been grouping them into ever-growing collections of Instagram artist scrapbooks. A final set of 20 of these books has been presented at the International Center of Photography, ICP, in New York from February 2017. Besides his personal stories, Thomas Dworzak continues to cover international stories, such as the DMZ in Korea, Cuba, Colombia, China, Liberia, the Arab Spring in Egypt, the war in Libya and most recently the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, Pokemon Go! and the 2016 US and run-up to the 2017 French Presidential elections. When covering the 2015 refugee crisis, he conceived “Europe - a photographic guide for refugees” which was produced and distributed free of charge to migrants. From June 2017 until 2020 Thomas Dworzak served as President of Magnum. In the summer and autumn of 2017 Thomas, together with writer Julius Strauss, travelled in the footsteps of John Steinbeck and Robert Capa’s 1947 “A Russian Journal”. His current long-time  project “War Games” has been interrupted since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when he has been exploring and photographing almost exclusively the new virtual, “Zoom”, world.

Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning immersive director whose work pushes the boundaries of immersive narrative and participatory experiences. Yasmin is Co-Founder at Scatter, where she heads content, production and marketing initiatives. Scatter is recognized for pioneering the emerging language of Volumetric Filmmaking through its original volumetric film productions and it's AR/VR creativity tools. Scatter’s first product Depthkit is the most widely used toolkit for accessible volumetric video capture. Yasmin directed the Emmy award-winning Zero Days VR (Sundance 2017) a documentary about cyber warfare and the Stuxnet virus. Yasmin co-directed Blackout (Tribeca 2017) an immersive documentary inviting New Yorkers to share their stories in their own voice. She is the co-creator of 18DaysInEgypt, an interactive documentary about the Egyptian Revolution that was lauded as one the Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary. Latest project is the Changing Same trilogy, a magical-realist, afro-futurist virtual reality film which explores the cyclical history of racial injustice in America. Changing Same is a co-production between RADA Studio and Scatter. Episode 1 premiered at Sundance 2021 and won “Best Immersive Narrative” at Tribeca Festival. Yasmin’s work has won multiple awards and exhibited at various festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, SIGGRAPH, Festival de Cannes, and the World Economic Forum. Yasmin is also a United States Artists 2020 Fellow.

Bill Gaskins combines personal, social, and historical interests that merge the visual and liberal arts through a rich tapestry of practice in photography, cinema, and non-fiction writing. A critical entry point for his work is his interest in the dual myths of photography and American life through depictions of race in visual culture. His relevance as a contemporary artist garners attention through solo and group exhibitions at major venues, including the Crocker Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of the seminal monograph of portraiture, Good & Bad Hair: Photographs by Bill Gaskins, and the producer, director, and editor of the timely short film The Meaning of Hope. Notable publishers of his thought-provoking exhibition reviews, editorials, interviews, and long-form essays include NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Society of Contemporary Craft, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Routledge Press, St. Martin’s Press, Artsy, New Art Examiner, Hipnotic Records, and the science journal, Nature. Bill Gaskins is also known for his engaged, informed, and inspired teaching by students and peers in private and public institutions, including the Department of Art at Cornell University, the School of Art, Media & Technology, Art & Design History & Theory at Parsons School of Design, the School for Public Engagement at The New School University, the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a recipient of the Watts Prize for Faculty Excellence from the Cornell University Department of Art, the University Distinguished Teaching Award at the New School University, and the Elaine L. Jacobs Endowed Chair in Art at the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art & Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is currently Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Photography + Media & Society at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Marvin Heiferman writes and organizes exhibitions and online projects about photography and visual culture for venues that have included: The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum.  Author of 15 books including Photography Changes Everything (2012 Smithsonian/Aperture) and Seeing Science (2019 Aperture/UMBC), Heiferman has contributed essays to numerous artist monographs, museum catalogs, trade publications, magazines and media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Artforum, Gagosian Quarterly, Design Observer, Aperture, Art in America, and BOMB. New entries to Heiferman’s multiple social media projects, collectively called WHY WE LOOK, are uploaded daily.

Isra Hirsi is an 18-year-old organizer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She co-founded US Youth Climate Strike in 2019 and has helped work on getting hundreds of strikes organized across the country on March 15th and September 20th, 2019. In 2020, she was put on Fortune's 40 under 40 for her work.

Joshua Irwandi (Jakarta, 1991) is a freelance documentary photographer and a National Geographic Explorer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Irwandi received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Exeter, and pursued graduate studies in photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication. While working in West Papua, Indonesia, Irwandi was embedded as museum staff at the Asmat Museum and focused on a long-term project on the changes in identity and landscape of the Asmat people. His project ’Not A Blank Canvas’ has been awarded the National Geographic Society storytelling grant in 2021. Irwandi’s work is part of the Forhanna Foundation Fund for Young Talent grant and National Geographic Society’s COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists project. One of his images, ‘The Human Cost of COVID-19’, sparked controversy in Indonesia when it went viral after publication by National Geographic. In 2021, he was selected as one of the speakers for the National Geographic Society’s Storytellers Summit. Recently, he was awarded the 2021 World Press Photo Award in General News and selected as a finalist of The Pulitzer Prizes in Breaking News Photography. Irwandi’s work has been featured in National Geographic, The Times of London, CNN, TIME, and The Guardian.

Jamie Sarai Margolin is a 19-year-old Jewish Colombian-American organizer, activist, author, public speaker, and filmmaker. She is co-founder of the international youth climate justice movement called Zero Hour that led the official "Youth Climate Marches" in Washington, DC and 25+ cities around the world during the summer of 2018. Zero Hour has over 200+ chapters worldwide and has been a leading organization in the climate movement. Jamie’s the author of a book called "Youth To Power: Your Voice and How To Use It,” (www.youthtopowerbook.com) which has been translated in many languages and sold all over the world. The book serves as a guide to organizing and activism. Jamie is also a plaintiff on the Our Children's Trust Youth v. Gov Washington state lawsuit, Aji P. vs. State of Washington, suing the state of Washington for denying her generation their constitutional rights to a livable environment by worsening the climate crisis. Jamie served as a surrogate for the Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential Campaign, speaking at several campaign rallies (including the 2020 Tacoma Dome rally to an audience of over 17 thousand people), filming campaign endorsement videos, and doing outreach to get out the vote for Bernie Sanders. She also was one of the youngest Delegates at the 2020 Democratic Convention. Jamie is also the director, screenwriter, and lead actress in a new web series called ART MAJORS (www.artmajorsshow.gay), which is a show about a friend group of LGBTQ+ art students struggling with queer love and breaking into the entertainment industry. She is also the host of “Lavender You” (https://lavenderyou.com), a podcast and online community talking about queer arts and media representation. Jamie is one of Teen Vogue’s “21 Under 21” girls changing the world in 2018, One of People Magazines 25 women changing the world in 2018, Fuse TV’s Latina Trailblazer of 2018, one of The Today Show’s 18 under 18 Groundbreakers of 2019, MTV EMA Generation Change winner of 2019, one of the BBC's 100 most influential women of 2019, and one of GLAAD’s 20 under 20 LGBTQ+ people changing the world. She is on the OUT 100 list of 2020.

Sarah Meister has recently assumed the position of Executive Director at Aperture, having been Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York since 2009. Her most recent projects at MoMA include considerations of the work of Josef Albers (2016), the 1967 exhibition New Documents (2017), Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (co-curator; 2017), Dorothea Lange (2018 and 2020), Frances Benjamin Johnston (2019), Gordon Parks (2020), Luigi Ghirri (2020) and, now on view, Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964. She was the original instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs, and is co-director of the August Sander Project (2016 to 2021). Provided portrait by Naima Green.

Vanessa Nakate, 24, is a climate activist from Uganda and founder of the Africa-based Rise Up Movement. She began striking for the climate in her home town of Kampala in January 2019, after witnessing droughts and flooding devastating communities in Uganda. She now campaigns internationally to highlight the impacts of climate change already playing out in Africa, as well as promoting key climate solutions such as educating girls. In 2020, Vanessa was named a UN Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as being listed one of the BBC's 100 Women of the year and the 100 most influential young Africans.

Lisa Osborne is head of emerging media at Black Public Media. She builds programs to support Black talent who work at the intersection of film, technology and art. Her goal is to increase the participation of Black creatives in XR, AI, and other experimental, tech-enabled storytelling. Lisa created the BPMplus Initiative (blackpublicmedia.org/bpmplus), which funds XR filmmakers, hosts tech mixers, screenings, and showcases, produces classes, and offers fellowships. With Denton Black Film Festival, she created "The Technically Brilliant Show," a talk show that profiles Black makers and execs working in emerging tech. In 2020, Lisa collaborated with MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology to launch the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship. She had a blast being a Tribeca Film Festival juror in 2019. When Lisa earned her journalism degree from Northwestern University, she dreamed of editing the film, travel, or books section of a print magazine. That plan, clearly, took a turn. @julipeno on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Josué Rivas (Mexica and Otomi) is an Indigenous Futurist, creative director, visual storyteller and educator working at the intersection of art, technology, journalism, and decolonization. His work aims to challenge the mainstream narrative about Indigenous peoples, co-create with the community, and serve as a vehicle for collective healing. He is a 2020 Catchlight Leadership Fellow, Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow, founder of the INDÍGENA, co-founder of Indigenous Photograph and Curator at Indigenous TikTok. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian,The New York Times, Apple, Nike and Converse amongst others. Josué is a guest in the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla (Portland, OR.)

Ellen Tolmie is a photography, film and essay documentarian. She worked as an editorial magazine photographer in Toronto (1974-1979), in documentary film in New York (1980-1986) and as a photographer in Bogotá (1986-1990), before directing UNICEF photography for 23 years at New York Headquarters (1990-2013). At UNICEF, she coordinated global image acquisition and distribution; created ethical and technical guidelines on the creation and use of images made by contracted professionals, staff and children; and produced, wrote and edited numerous photography essays, mini-docs and multimedia pieces on international development and rights issues. Ellen also collaborated with photographers and child protection specialists on organization-wide policies to protect the names and visual identities of children at risk of stigma or greater harm when telling their stories. In 1990, a Colombian book of her photographs, Por Nuestros Niños/For Our Children, profiled three national development programs for children there. At UNICEF, she had varied editorial roles on several image books including I Dream of Peace, drawings and texts by war-affected children in the countries of former Yugoslavia (1994); The End of Polio, photographs by Sebastião Salgado on the global campaign to eradicate this disease (2003); Full of Grace by Raymond Merritt, a survey of visual representations of children since the invention of photography (2007); and The Rights of Children, a visual rendering of rights defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child through photographs by long-time UNICEF collaborator, Giacomo Pirozzi (2009). Ellen returned to Toronto in 2014 where she works on varied projects, including co-directing Dancing Darkness, a documentary on the making of a contemporary dance that world premiered at New York’s 2020 Dance on Film Festival and nationally at Montreal’s 2021 Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA).

Aliza Virji is a rising junior at The Wheatley School who is extremely passionate about social justice and political movements. Her goal is to make as much impact as possible in the future by learning more about the community and society surrounding her.

Donald Weber (1973, Toronto) was educated at the Ontario College of Art and Design and worked as an architect with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, prior to photography. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His diverse photography projects have been exhibited as installations, exhibitions and screenings worldwide, including the United Nations, Museum of the Army at Les Invalides in Paris, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum. He is the head of the graduate program Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and is a PhD candidate at Leiden University/PhDArts.

Alexey Yurenev is a Russian-American photographer, multidisciplinary storyteller and an educator, working on the subjects of memory and truth. His work spans approaches from analogue photography to synthetic imagery. After graduating the documentary program at the International Center of Photography in 2018, Yurenev’s long-form projects have been featured in The New York Times and National Geographic. At the start of the pandemic, together with Fred Ritchin and a group of ICP alumni, Yurenev co-founded an online publication - FOTODEMIC.org, dedicated to the exploration of innovative visual strategies. Yurenev is currently working on a project called Silent Hero, using artificial intelligence to recover lost memory of his grandfather’s experience during WWII.