Photography as a Medium of Change: Practice, Politics, and History

American Culture Studies
presents
Photography as a Medium of
Change: Practice, Politics,
and History
Panel Discussion
Thursday, April 23rd, 2015
3:30-5:15pm, Room DUC 276
What are the politics of representing the black subject and the black community in photography? What moral
obligations do photographers confront when photographing civil rights struggles--to the community? to presenting
multiple viewpoints? to creating an archive for the local community, in its effort to know and preserve its stories for
future generations?
Who are the imagined audiences for civil rights photography? what are the politics of the photographer's physical
presence--inserting her/his body into the scene of struggle? coming into the community invited or uninvited? how
do photographs engage with and potentially transform public discourse in the age of social media?
Should the photographer aspire to create an "iconic image" of the sort that so powerfully shapes understandings of
the mid-20th-century civil rights movement?
The panel is one of an ongoing series of AMCS "Master Classes" which invites and creates
conversations about the politics of practicing, theorizing and historicizing art forms. The goal is to
create a platform upon which practitioners, historians, theoreticians, researchers and teachers can,
from their different perspectives, discuss the politics of such media.
Featured Panelists:
Matthew Fox-Amato
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow in Modeling Interdisciplinary
Inquiry, Washington University
Leigh Raiford
Associate Professor, African American
Studies and African Diaspora Studies,
University of California, Berkeley
Adrian O. Walker
Photographer
Angela Miller
Professor, Art History and Archeology,
Washington University
Co-Sponsored By Law, Identity, and Culture Initiative, WUSTL School of Law. See Related Law, Identity, and Culture
Event: (Un)Civil Mediations: A Civil Rights and Visual Culture Symposium, April 23-25.
Symposium Schedule at: http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu