events & groups
IRIS Nights Lecture Series (Thursday evenings from 6:30 to 8pm)
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The Annenberg Space for Photography offers live programming through the lecture series entitled IRIS NIGHTS. IRIS NIGHTS is a public program offered free of charge, by online reservation on a first-come, first-served basis. IRIS NIGHTS brings to life the featured exhibit with hourlong lectures by the photographers featured in the Photography Space exhibits, as well as by other notable guest artists and experts. These programs give attendees unique access to the artists in the intimate setting of the Photography Space.
Lecture Series Schedule:
| Thu, 07.01.10 |
Robert Glenn Ketchum & Joel Reynolds - "Southwest Alaska, Bristol Bay and The Pebble Mine" |
| Thu, 07.08.10 | Brian L. Frank - "The River and the War" |
| Thu, 07.15.10 | Kate Orne - "May You Never Be Uncovered": The Victims of Pakistan’s Sex Trade |
| Thu, 07.22.10 | Stanley Greene |
| Thu, 07.29.10 | Ami Vitale - "The Story Within the Story" |
| Thu, 08.05.10 | Elizabeth Kreutz - "Lance Armstrong - Comeback 2.0" |
| Thu, 08.12.10 | David Butow - "Photographing China" |
| Thu, 08.19.10 | Kitra Cahana - "Welcome to Rainbowland" |
| Thu, 08.26.10 | Katie Falkenberg - "Bringing Issues to Light Through Photography" |
| Thu, 09.02.10 | Francine Orr |
| Thu, 09.16.10 | Renée C. Byer - "The Storytelling Power of Photography" |
| Thu, 09.23.10 | Larry Towell - "Being Human" |
| Thu, 09.30.10 | Rick Loomis - "OUT THERE: Photographs that Matter" |
Robert Glenn Ketchum:
"Southwest Alaska, Bristol Bay and The Pebble Mine"
Thursday, July 1, 6:30-8:00pm
The pristine and park-filled habitat of southwest Alaska supports the most productive fishery left in North America, Bristol Bay. Currently all these lands and the value of their renewable resources are being placed at risk by the proposed development of the colossal Pebble mine project. Robert Glenn Ketchum has been in southwest Alaska since 1998 generating pictures and stories that have drawn a significant coalition of interests together to oppose the mine. One of those coalition associates is the Natural Resources Defense Council, on whose behalf senior attorney Joel Reynolds will also underscore the importance of Americans addressing this important issue.
Robert Glenn Ketchum is a founding Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). Audubon magazine named him as one of the 100 people "who shaped the environmental movement of the 20th Century," and in 2010 he followed Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Annie Leibovitz in being the fifth photographer named to American Photo magazine's Master Series. Ketchum lectures widely on behalf of conservation and habitat protection, has published numerous books, and is exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. His work can be found locally in the collections of UCLA, MOCA, LACMA and the Huntington Library.
Joel Reynolds joined the Natural Resources Defense Council as a Senior Attorney in 1990, after ten years with the Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, both in Los Angeles. He graduated in 1975 from the University of California, Riverside with degrees in Music and Political Science, and in 1978 from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and winner of the Convers Prize. After law school, he clerked for US District Judge John Bartels in New York and, since 1980, has specialized in complex law reform litigation, arguing cases on behalf of environmental and community organizations at all levels of the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Joel Reynolds currently heads NRDC’s Southern California Program, where he has focused on litigation and major domestic and international campaigns across a broad range of environmental issues, including children’s health, environmental justice, endangered species and coastal protection, transportation, parkland conservation, and marine mammal protection.
Reynolds has been involved in a series of major land acquisitions for the purpose of parkland creation and open space protection. In 2008, he successfully concluded a two-year negotiation that resulted in one of the largest conservation deals in California history -- an agreement for the permanent protection of approximately 90% of the historic 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch in California’s Central Valley.
He has twice been recognized by California Lawyer Magazine as California Lawyer of the Year in the environmental category in 2003 and in 2008. He has been appointed to numerous state and federal commissions, and is a frequent contributor to the Opinion pages of major newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor.
On June 14, 2009, he was recognized by Senator Barbara Boxer with a first annual Environmental Leadership Award.
Brian L. Frank:
"The River and the War"
Thursday, July 8, 6:30-8:00pm
A San Francisco native, Brian L. Frank studied photojournalism at San Francisco State University. While in college, he worked on social documentary projects throughout Latin America, mainly focusing on workers’ rights and social injustice.
Frank has always found inspiration from his parents -- his mother is a first-generation immigrant from the island of Trinidad, and his father is a paramedic and staunch union activist. During an extended break from school, he drove an old VW Beetle across Mexico, landing in Mexico City, where he lived and worked until August 2009. Based in San Francisco again, he continues to work in Mexico as well as Southern California.
Frank was awarded the 2010 Global Vision Award by POYi for "Downstream: The Death of the Colorado," and won the 2009 National Press Photographers Association’s Domestic News Picture Story for "La Guerra Mexicana." He placed second overall in the Hearst Photojournalism Championship in 2009.
A frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle , his work has appeared in Esquire , Newsweek , TIME , Photo District News , The New York Times , The Dallas Morning News , Global Post and other publications and wire services.
His archive is syndicated through Redux Pictures, New York, NY.
Kate Orne:
"May You Never Be Uncovered"
The Victims of Pakistan's Sex Trade
Thursday, July 15, 6:30-8:00pm
Since 2005, photographer Kate Orne's work has been focused on the little-known sex industry in Pakistan, which exists behind a façade of modesty, denial, pretense and cultural oppression. She was the first photographer allowed to document trafficking victims, madams, prostitutes and their children.
Orne’s journey to document the issues of human rights, isolation, intimacy and sexuality began in 2001 when she encountered impoverished Afghan widows in refugee camps in Pakistan. She was repeatedly told prostitution did not exist in Islamic countries like Pakistan, yet the women she encountered seemed to have no other means to support their children.
Strict adherence to fundamentalist Islamic law often leads to the denial of these women’s existence, and sometimes prostitution is punishable by death. The irony is that -- unlike any other workplace in Pakistan -- women who work in these brothels are the breadwinners. Orne’s portraits of these women highlight the juxtaposition within this closed community.
Born and raised in Sweden, Orne began her photography career 15 years ago. She has lived in New York City for the last 23 years.
Stanley Greene
Thursday, July 22, 6:30-8:00pm
Photographer Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. As a teenager, Greene was a member of the Black Panthers and an anti-Vietnam War activist. A founding member of SF Camerawork, an exhibition space for avant-garde photography, Greene has photographed wars and poverty in Africa, the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia and the Middle East.
He has won five World Press Photo awards for his work around the world. His photos have been published in Libération , The New York Times Magazine , Newsweek , Rolling Stone , Paris-Match , TIME , Stern and Fortune , among others. Greene published the photo book Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 (Trolley).
He was awarded an Alicia Patterson fellowship in 1998, the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Award in 2004 and the Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2006.
Ami Vitale:
"The Story Within the Story"
Thursday, July 29, 6:30-8:00pm
Ami Vitale's work as a photojournalist has taken her to more than 75 countries, where she witnessed civil unrest, poverty and unspeakable violence. In the midst of this despair, she captured surreal beauty and the enduring power of the human spirit.
The four years Vitale spent in Kashmir were among the most formative of her life. By sharing enduring images and stories of humanity along the Pakistan-India border, she will illustrate the persistence of life in unimaginable conditions. Vitale’s work highlights the surprising and subtle similarities between cultures.
Vitale's photographs have been featured by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, the Open Society Institute and others. Her work garnered a POYi award, the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, multiple Lucie awards, the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting and the National Press Photographers Association’s Magazine Photographer of the Year award. Photo District News recognized her as one of 30 image makers of the future.
Vitale's stories have been awarded grants including the first-ever Inge Morath Award from Magnum Photos, the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her work in Kashmir, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace grant. Her photographs have been published in prestigious national and international magazines.
Now based in Miami, Florida, Vitale is a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine and is also senior producer for the Knight Center for International Media.
Elizabeth Kreutz:
"Lance Armstrong -- Comeback 2.0"
Thursday, August 5, 6:30-8:00pm
Elizabeth Kreutz is an independent photojournalist specializing in documentary sports photography. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, she attended the University of Texas and studied photojournalism under department head J.B. Colson. She has traveled around the world and been granted exclusive access to photograph Lance Armstrong and the Discovery and Astana cycling teams. Kreutz photographed the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
As a leader in her field, Kreutz was one of the few photographers asked to test new Canon digital equipment and was asked to participate in a round table discussion at the prestigious Visa pour l'Image festival in Perpignan, France. Her work has been featured in publications including Newsweek , Sports Illustrated , USA Today , the Guardian , L'Équipe , La Gazzetta Dello Sport , Stern , Outside , Runners World , Velonews and Triathlete .
Kreutz and Lance Armstrong co-authored the book Comeback 2.0: Up Close and Personal . In 2010, her work with Armstrong received three awards -- World Press Photo for Sports Feature Story (first place), POYi for Sports Picture Story (first place) and the Photo District News Photo Annual.
She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband James Bonney and their new baby Charlie.
David Butow:
"Photographing China"
Thursday, August 12, 6:30-8:00pm
California-based photojournalist David Butow first visited China in 1986 while in college. It was over a decade before he returned, but he has since visited China a dozen times in the last 10 years, developing a fascination with the rapid modernization and the resulting changes in society. His photographs have captured a variety of subjects ranging from traditional village life to glitzy urban nightclubs, as well as Chinese society’s response to AIDS and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
The photo essays he will show document the Uighurs, an ethnic group from the remote and underdeveloped Western region of the country, and trendy twenty-somethings living in modern Shanghai. Butow’s pictures will illuminate these contrasts, raising questions of what values Chinese society will cling to, discard and adopt during the country’s emergence as a world power.
His pictures from China have appeared in worldwide exhibitions and been published in books including National Geographic’s Dragon Rising , Visions of Paradise and Inside China . In 2007, Butow was commissioned to do principal photography for the National Geographic Traveler guidebook on Shanghai.
Over the last three decades, Butow has won awards from World Press Photo, POYi and Communications Arts , among others. He is a member of Redux Pictures and spent 15 years as a contract photographer with US News & World Report magazine covering assignments in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Peru and Yemen.
Kitra Cahana
"Welcome to Rainbowland"
Thursday, August 19, 6:30-8:00pm
Kitra Cahana is an American-born photographer who grew up in both Montreal, Canada and Gothenburg, Sweden. She began her career at 17, when one of her photographs of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza landed on the front page of The New York Times . In 2007, she worked at The New York Times as a photographic intern. Cahana then received a scholarship to work at Benetton's research communication center in Treviso, Italy. There, she contributed to stories for COLORS magazine, covering issues in the Pacific islands of Vanuatu and Niue, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya.
Cahana’s Rainbowland , shot for COLORS #76: Teenagers won First Prize - Stories in the World Press Photo’s Art and Entertainment section. She was also a Finalist for POYi’s Community Awareness Award for her work on the Rainbow Family, a non-hierarchical group that holds free gatherings around the world. In July 2009, they brought 25,000 people together for a week in the wilderness in New Mexico. Cahana was there photographing for COLORS .
Cahana was chosen to be the 2009 photographic intern at National Geographic magazine. She recently graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. Currently, Cahana splits her time between Chisinau, Moldova and Minsk, Belarus. She is a contributing photographer for Reportage by Getty Images, and is presently pursuing her Masters in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin.
Katie Falkenberg:
"Bringing Issues to Light Through Photography"
Thursday, August 26, 6:30-8:00pm
From the quiet "hollers" of West Virginia to the bustling streets of Pakistan, Katie Falkenberg has spent the last five years documenting some of the most pressing social issues in the United States and abroad. These include the environmental and human toll of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia, the health care crisis in the United States and domestic violence in Pakistan. Most recently, Falkenberg has begun incorporating audio and video with her still photography, giving subjects a voice and providing viewers with a more personal story. Her determination to document these issues in a compelling and accurate way have encouraged people from all walks of life to open their doors and share their stories, no matter how sensitive the topic.
Falkenberg began her career in Washington, D.C., where she covered the White House and Capitol Hill as a freelance photographer. After graduate work at Ohio University, she joined the staff of The Washington Times in 2006, where she worked on a variety of feature and news stories, traveled on the 2008 campaign trail and covered both the Bush and Obama administrations. In March 2010, Falkenberg moved to California and is currently a freelance photographer on contract with the Los Angeles Times .
Her photography and multimedia work have received awards from POYi, the White House News Photographers Association, Editor & Publisher, and the National Press Photographers Association. Her short film, Uninsured in the Mississippi Delta , was recently selected for the Media That Matters 2010 Film Festival, where it received the Human Rights Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , TIME , Rolling Stone , GQ and Vanity Fair , among others.
Francine Orr
Thursday, September 2, 6:30-8:00pm
Growing up in Colorado, Francine Orr was profoundly affected by images of the American civil rights movement, which led her to study history and art at the University of Saint Mary, in Leavenworth, Kansas. After college, Orr volunteered for the Peace Corps on the island of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia before beginning her career as a photojournalist.
While living in a Yapese village and working with visiting anthropologists and documentary teams, she learned how to be a quiet observer -- a skill that served her well during her extensive work in Africa and Asia. Her six-part series chronicling poverty in Africa, "Living on Pennies," a collaboration with Los Angeles Times Managing Editor Davan Maharaj, inspired readers to donate tens of thousands of dollars to aid agencies working in Africa.
Orr is a staff photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times and has won numerous awards for her journalism.
Renée C. Byer:
"The Storytelling Power of Photography"
Thursday, September 16, 6:30-8:00pm
Renée C. Byer is a Senior Photojournalist at the Sacramento Bee and has been profiled in newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Byer has the rare inner lens needed to produce photos with profound emotional resonance and sensitivity.
She is currently working on a book project for the nonprofit organization The Forgotten International, with the working title Living on a Dollar a Day. Her hope is to tell the story of the more than one billion individuals around the world who work long hours -- sometimes under dangerous conditions -- to ultimately earn only about a dollar a day. Byer's goal is to raise awareness of the women, children, and families at the bottom of the economic ladder, who work so hard just to stay alive.
Byer’s talent has brought her many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in feature photography for a series called "A Mother’s Journey," the McClatchy President's Award, the Associated Press's Mark Twain Award for Excellence in News Photography, the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, the POYi World Understanding Award and World Hunger's Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism.
Her work has been exhibited most recently at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Other exhibits include the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph, the Hartmann Center Art Gallery, the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, FotoWeek, the Exposure Gallery, Days Japan International photojournalism exhibit, the International Children’s Cancer Day and the Angkor Wat photography festival. An interactive video interview with Byer and her twenty Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs can be viewed in a permanent kiosk exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC.
Byer, a native New Yorker, graduated cum laude from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois in 1980. She is married to photographer Paul Kitagaki, Jr.
Larry Towell:
"Being Human"
Thursday, September 23, 6:30-8:00pm
Larry Towell's business card reads "Human Being." Experience as a poet and a folk musician has done much to shape his personal style. The son of a car repairman, Towell grew up in a large family in rural Ontario. During studies in visual arts at Toronto's York University, he was given a camera and taught how to process black-and-white film.
A stint of volunteer work in Calcutta in 1976 further inspired Towell to photograph and write. In 1984, he became a freelance photographer and writer focusing on issues such as dispossessed peoples, exile and peasant rebellion. He completed projects on the Nicaraguan Contra War, the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala and American Vietnam War veterans who returned to Vietnam to rebuild the country after the war. His first published magazine essay, "Paradise Lost," exposed the ecological consequences of the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound. He became a Magnum nominee in 1988, and a full member in 1993.
In 1996, Towell completed a project based on ten years of reportage in El Salvador, followed the next year by a major book on the Palestinians. His fascination with landlessness also led him to document the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an eleven-year project completed in 2000. With the help of the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, he finished a second highly-acclaimed book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2005, and in 2008 released the award-winning The World From My Front Porch, a project on his own family in rural Ontario where he sharecrops a 75-acre farm.
Rick Loomis:
"OUT THERE: Photographs that Matter"
Thursday, September 30, 6:30-8:00pm
Rick Loomis won the Pulitzer Prize for his yearlong project documenting the ills of the world’s oceans. He has been a photojournalist for the Los Angeles Times since 1994, covering a wide array of topics with an empathetic eye that draws viewers into situations they might not otherwise witness.
Over the last decade, two major themes have run though Loomis' work - the environment and world conflict. He will present a mix of images and multimedia presentations ranging from his war experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, work on the "Altered Oceans," the earthquake in Haiti and the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Since September 11, 2001, Loomis has been intensely involved in documenting the United States war against terrorist groups. He spent a month in New York City in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and then followed the story to Afghanistan. Since then, he’s spent almost two years living in Afghanistan -- either embedded with the Army, Marines or Special Forces, or telling the civilian side of the story.
An avid SCUBA diver since the age of 15, Loomis has explored some of the world's most pristine and remote corners, as well as the damaged depths of sewage outflows and urchin barrens. In pursuit of environmentally-based stories, he has camped on the Alaskan tundra, trekked through the jungles of Uganda and rappelled from cliffs in the remote Oregon wilderness.
A graduate of Western Kentucky University, Loomis holds a BA in Photojournalism and a minor in Latin American Studies. He lives in Long Beach, California, with his girlfriend and their dog Tikka.
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