events & groups

IRIS Nights Lecture Series (Thursday evenings from 6:30 to 8pm)

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, 04.01.10	Daniel Beltra - "The State of Tropical Rainforests"
Thu, 04.08.10	Balazs Gardi - "Facing Water Crisis"
Thu, 04.15.10	Lynn Johnson - "The Burden of Thirst"
Thu, 04.29.10	Ken Light - "40 Years Focusing on Social Issues Facing America"
Thu, 05.06.10	Camille Seaman - "Connection and Purpose"
Thu, 05.13.10	Dennis Dimick - "Environmental Photojournalism at National Geographic"
Thu, 05.20.10	David Maisel - "Black Maps"
Thu, 05.27.10	David Griffin - "Inside National Geographic Magazine"
Thu, 06.03.10	Ian Shive - "Water & Sky: A Photographic Journey from the Arctic to the Himalaya"
Thu, 06.10.10	Gil Garcetti - "Women, Water, And Wells"

Daniel Beltra:
"The State of Tropical Rainforests"
Thursday, April 1, 6:30-8:00pm

Daniel Beltra won in 2009 the Prince's Rainforests Project Award (PRP). The PRP commissioned Daniel to photograph for a month each rainforests in the Brazilian Amazon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia. The photos that Daniel produced during this time, along with some from his archive from previous years, were edited together to produce a book, online multimedia presentations, pamphlets and print exhibitions around the world. These various forms of media were aimed to help people make the connection between tropical deforestation and global warming and how their own consumption habits impact these processes.

Tropical deforestation is responsible for a fifth of the world's carbon emissions. The economic forces of logging, mining and agricultural development destroy nearly 60 million square miles of virgin rainforests every year. Native plants are made extinct before they are ever documented and indigenous peoples find their land ever more encroached upon. Stopping, or at least slowing, tropical deforestation will mitigate the impact that global warming is already having on the planet. Daniel hopes that the photos he produced for the PRP will help the public understand the environmental consequences of tropical deforestation.

Daniel Beltrá is a conservation photographer based in Seattle. Originally from Madrid, Daniel began shooting for Greenpeace in 1990. His work has been recognized by the World Press Photo awards, the Pictures of the Year International and the National Press Photographers Association.

Balazs Gardi:
"Facing Water Crisis"
Thursday, April 8, 6:30-8:00pm

Balazs Gardi This project is about the crises that currently surround the vital yet destructive presence, crippling absence and strategic value of water worldwide.

Independent photographer, Balazs Gardi works to capture stories about marginalized communities in desperate situations. He spends time with people struck by the harshest conditions as events unfold in overpopulated slums, refugee camps, natural disasters, war zones, and other crisis areas, which are often under-represented in the mainstream media.

Gardi believes that only honest attention wins the trust and reaches the real emotions and personal stories of people entangled in such life-threatening situations. He uses this approach to identify early symptoms of catastrophes before they develop into sensational news stories or gain widespread attention.

Gardi spent two years following how the Roma (gypsy) minorities trying to deal with their growing poverty, declining social status and appalling living conditions in a dozen Eastern European countries. He has traveled regularly to Afghanistan and Pakistan to document life in a region in a state of insecurity and a downward spiral that is dragging these countries back to open warfare.

In recent years, his attention has gradually turned to reporting the local harbingers of the global water crisis. This has evolved into "Facing Water Crisis," his most ambitious photography project to date. It features an expanding series of individual stories about the most life-threatening environmental crisis mankind has ever faced, covering numerous heavily affected regions around the world.

Lynn Johnson:
"The Burden of Thirst"
Thursday, April 15, 6:30-8:00pm

Lynn Johnson is known for her intense and sensitive work, dividing her time between assignments for National Geographic and various foundations. Johnson has traveled from Siberia to Zambia, photographed many famous celebrities to the entire Supreme Court. Yet her favorite assignments have been emotionally demanding stories about ordinary people.

Her vision is subtle. She invites the viewer to find the meaning in the frame. Her shooting style is equally low key allowing her subjects to reveal themselves to the camera. After 30 years of practicing photography, she sees her personal work moving from that of an observer to advocate.

As a Knight Fellow in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University, Johnson completed a rigorous program that included her Masters thesis, an exhibit about the hate crimes on American Society, Hate Kills.

Johnson first earned a B.A. in photographic illustration and photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After graduating she was a staff photographer at The Pittsburgh Press for seven years before beginning her freelance career as a contact photographer for the Black Star then Aurora Photos. She is currently represented by the National Geographic Image Collection.

Ken Light:
"40 Years Focusing on Social Issues Facing America"
Thursday, April 29, 6:30-8:00pm

Ken Light has worked as a documentary photographer for over 40 years focusing on social issues facing America.

His projects and books have included Coal Hollow, U.C.Press (2006) which observes the conditions that remain after the mechanization of coal in rural West Virginia. Texas Death Row (1996), which portrays the lives of men waiting to be executed on Texas death row. This work has been published internationally including in Newsweek, Paris Match and the New Yorker, and broadcast worldwide, including on 60 Minutes. His book Delta Time, Smithsonian Institution Press (1995) looks at rural black poverty. His other books include To The Promised Land (Aperture 1988), With These Hands (1986) and In The Fields (1982) all examine undocumented workers. Witness in Our Time : Lives of Working Documentary Photographers (2000) is a text that has been adapted in college photo programs around the United States and a revised second edition is currently being printed by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Light’s work has also been exhibited internationally in over 200 exhibitions including one-person shows at the International Center for Photography, Smith College Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, Track 16, and the Southeast Museum of Photography. He has received 4 NEA Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, as well as numerous foundation grants. Including one from the Soro’s Open Society Institute.

He was a founder of Fotovision.org and the International Fund for Documentary Photography and is on the faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and Director of its Center for Photography.

Camille Seaman:
"Connection and Purpose"
Thursday, May 6, 6:30-8:00pm

Photographer Camille Seaman has traveled between both the North and South Polar Regions for the last ten years documenting the fragile environment and its otherworldly beauty. Her work captures the essence of awe and beauty of indigenous cultures and environments in a sophisticated documentary/fine art tradition. People often wonder what one person can do to help save this planet we call home, Seaman will discuss this question from the perspective being part of both an indigenous culture and a modern world.

Seaman was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover. Her work has been exhibited and published in magazines internationally including Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men's Journal, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo and she has self-published many books on themes like “My China” and “Melting Away: Polar Images” through Fastback Creative Books, a company that she co-founded.

Seaman’s photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. In 2008 she was honored with a one-person exhibition, “The Last Iceberg” at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC. Her current project concerns the beauty of natural environments in Siberia. Camille Seaman lives in Berkeley, California.

Dennis Dimick:
"Environmental Photojournalism at National Geographic"
Thursday, May 13, 6:30-8:00pm

Dennis Dimick, Executive Editor for environment at National Geographic Magazine, helped guide the creation of the April 2010 issue on global freshwater on display at The Annenberg Space for Photography.

His lecture will focus on outstanding examples of environmental photojournalism, including behind-the-scenes details on the creation of the April 2010 National Geographic Magazine freshwater issue. A picture editor with nearly 30 years experience at National Geographic and 14 years as a faculty member at the Missouri Photo Workshop, Dimick will show outstanding recent environmental photography from the pages of the magazine and discuss how photographers interested in the environment can produce insightful reports.

He has guided photo coverage on many environmental stories including: Greenland (2010), end of cheap food (2009), Canadian oil sands (2009), Australian drought (2009), Our Good Earth: Soils (2008), Carbon Crisis (2007), melting ice (2007), and climate change (2004).

Dimick orchestrates the annual Aspen Environment Forum co-sponsored with the Aspen Institute and regularly presents slide show lectures on energy, climate, and the environment. Recent audiences have included England’s University of Nottingham, Mountainfilm at Telluride, MIT’s Earth System Initiative, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, Goldman Sachs Leadership Forum, the World Conservation Congress, and U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.

An Oregon native, he holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oregon State University. Before joining National Geographic, he was a newspaper photographer and editor in Oregon, Washington, and at The Courier-Journal of Louisville, KY. He and his family live in Arlington, VA.

David Maisel:
"Black Maps"
Thursday, May 20, 6:30-8:00pm

For more than twenty years, David Maisel has been making aerial photographs of sites of environmental impact. This extended series, called Black Maps, shows the undoing of the natural world by wide-scaled human intervention in the landscape. His images of zones where the natural order has been eradicated are both spectacular and horrifying. Although Maisel’s photographs evidence the devastation of these locations, they also transcribe interior, psychic landscapes—for, as otherworldly and surreal as these images appear, they depict shattered realities of our own making. The forms of environmental disquiet and degradation function on a metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its undoing. Black Maps has unfolded in chapters, focusing on such subjects as strip-mines, clear-cuts, leaching fields, tailings ponds, and firestorms. The Lake Project (2001-2003) is comprised of images made in the vicinity of Owens Lake in California, which was drained and depleted to bring water to the desert city of Los Angeles, and which became an enormous environmental disaster in this process. Terminal Mirage (2003-2005) uses aerial images made at the site of the Great Salt Lake as a means to explore both abstraction and, as the curator Anne Tucker has written about this series, "the disturbingly engaging duality between beauty and repulsion."

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was a 2007 Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and a 2008 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Maisel is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and others. His monograph The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), was selected as one of the Top 25 Photography Books of 2004 by the critic Vince Aletti. His second monograph, Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), depicts tonally-reversed black and white aerial views of Los Angeles.

David Griffin:
"Inside National Geographic Magazine"
Thursday, May 27, 6:30-8:00pm

Do you have what it takes to be a photographer for National Geographic Magazine? David Griffin, the Director of Photography of National Geographic Magazine headquartered in Washington, DC, will explain what are the traits he looks for in the photographers who will do assignments for the magazine. In addition he will take us on a behind-the-scenes tour of how photographic stories are nurtured, shaped and presented to the magazine’s global audience of 40 million readers.

David helps shape the photographic direction of the magazine, working with a staff editors and contributing photographers from around the globe.

Prior to National Geographic Magazine, he worked for U.S.News & World Report, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hartford Courant, The Everett (Wa.) Herald, and the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune. David has worked as a photographer, editor and graphic designer.

David is actively involved with the boards of the International Center of Photography, The Eddie Adams Workshop, Look3: Festival of the Photograph, and the W. Eugene Smith Fund. His work has been honored by numerous professional associations.

David has a degree in journalism from Ohio University and is an alumni of the Stanford Professional Publishing program. He is married, has a thirteen-year-old son, and lives in Arlington, Virginia

Ian Shive:
"Water & Sky: A Photographic Journey from the Arctic to the Himalaya"
Thursday, June 3, 6:30-8:00pm

Join award-winning conservation photographer and author Ian Shive at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City, CA, on Thursday, June 3, 2010, 6:30 p.m., where he will present an archive of images that examine how our natural world interacts and is connected with the planet’s most valuable but increasingly threatened resource, fresh water, which constitutes 2.5 percent of the 70 percent of all water that covers Earth.

Ian's photographs will trace the path that Arctic glaciers follow as they transform into rivers on the tundra, give witness to one of the world's largest collections of terraced waterfalls in Eastern Europe two decades after the Bosnian Conflict of the 90s, as well as exploring the spiritually curative waters of the Ganges in the lower Himalayan Mountains and more.

Ian is the recent recipient of the Gold Medal, 2010 Nautilus Book Award, in the Great Peacekeepers category in recognition of his top-selling book The National Parks: Our American Landscape, released in August 2009 on Earth Aware Editions, for promoting "spiritual growth, conscious living and positive social change…and offering the reader 'new possibilities' for a better life and world," joining previous Nautilus Award winners including Deepak Chopra, M.D., Eckhart Tolle, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, among others.

Referred to as the leading chronicler of America’s National Parks today and a self-labeled "wilderness diplomat," Ian and his book The National Parks: Our American Landscape were the focus of a presentation on the challenges facing America’s most beloved landscapes in Washington, D.C. in November 2009, hosted by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Max Baucus.

Shive has dedicated his life to not only creating memorable photographs but also championing environmental awareness. Using photography as his primary tool, he has pioneered trends with new technologies to further the art of story telling through imagery. His photographs have appeared around the world in every major outdoor publication including National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Explorer, Outside Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Nature Conservancy, National Parks Magazine, and Popular Science, as well as numerous other major publications.

Shive is a resident of Los Angeles, CA.

Gil Garcetti:
"Women, Water, And Wells"
Thursday, June 10, 6:30-8:00pm

Through compelling black and white images of community life in West Africa, Gil Garcetti shows the critical needs of millions of people who live without safe water, together with the uplifting pictorial accounts of success and hope that come with providing clean water.

The photographs relate a powerful story in scenes of landscape and environment; of community life and the daily struggle to obtain water; of water sources, contamination and the resulting health impact on local populations; as well as scenes of great success and celebration, including water initiatives and micro-enterprises that have enabled the communities documented to expand education and health efforts.

Garcetti’s book, WATER IS KEY, includes 78 black and white photographs and features essays by prominent leaders, President Jimmy Carter, former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, and the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sileaf. (All proceeds from the sale of the book go to non-profit organizations working on safe water related projects in West Africa.)

Many people remember Gil Garcetti as the Los Angeles County District Attorney. Much of his life, however, has been as an urban photographer. Since leaving the District Attorney’s office in 2000, Gil has six photographic books published and has had photographic exhibitions around the world including the United Nations, the National Building Museum, Washington D.C., the Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, China, New York City Public Library for Performing Arts, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

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