Photography, Power & the Ethics of Representation
Session #2 | Imaged by History
M. Neelika Jayawardane (facilitator)
M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg (South Africa). She is a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on the Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency that operated during the last decade of apartheid. She was a founding member of the online magazine, Africa is a Country. Along with academic publications, her writing is featured in Aperture, Transition, Contemporary &, Contemporary Practices: Visual Art from the Middle East, and Even Magazine.
Asim Rafiqui
Asim Rafiqui is an independent photojournalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, Time Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Stern Magazine, National Geographic (France) and many other publications. Asim has reported from Haiti, Japan, India, Pakistan, USA, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Sweden and Ukraine, among other places. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he moved to New York in 1984 to study engineering at Columbia University and has since lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Lahore, London, Munich, Bangkok, Stockholm and Kigali. Asim was a Fulbright Fellow and an Aftermath Grant awardee to India, where he worked on the Idea of India project documenting India’s heritage of cultural and religious pluralism and syncretism. Asim is using a variety of media to present a more nuanced and personal perspective on the issue of access to justice in Pakistan. He was awarded an Open Society Fellowship in 2012 and also received a Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting grant to document the impact of the Israeli closure of the Gaza Strip on its residents. In 2015 Asim received the Magnum EF Grant for his work on the missing and disappeared in Baluchistan and the role of the Pakistani State. He authors the photography and politics blog The Spinning Head. He is currently based in London, UK.
Sarah Sentilles
Sarah Sentilles is a writer, teacher, critical theorist, scholar of religion, and author of many books, including Draw Your Weapons, which won the 2018 PEN Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her next book, Stranger Care, will be published by Random House in May 2021. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, Religion Dispatches and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook and Yaddo. She earned a bachelor's degree at Yale and master's and doctoral degrees at Harvard. She is the co-founder of the Alliance of Idaho, which works to protect the human rights of immigrants by engaging in education, outreach, and advocacy at local, state, and national levels. At the core of her scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, social transformation, and justice movements. She has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State University, California State University Channel Islands and Willamette University, where she was the Mark and Melody Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor. She teaches writing workshops and works one-on-one with clients to help support their art, writing, and creativity.
Candice Jansen
Candice Jansen writes on photography. Her post-graduate studies started at Duke University where Jansen completed a Masters of Liberal Studies as an American Association of University Women Fellow in 2014. She spent a year at Duke’s Centre for Documentary Studies as Exhibition Assistant where Jansen co-curated, BINNEGOED: Coloured & South African Photography (2015). She conducted her doctoral research at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) as a PHD fellow in Art History. Her dissertation, COLOURED BLACK: The Life & Works of South African Photographers, Cedric Nunn and Ernest Cole (2019) was completed at Northwestern University’s Program for Critical Theory in the Global South, as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Jansen has written and spoken on photography for the Toronto Photography Seminar, Aperture, Centers of Learning for Photography in Africa, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, and the International Workshop in Visual History & Theory at the University of the Western Cape. She is responsible for research, archives, & exhibitions programming at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, and in 2019 was appointed as a Research Associate with Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg.
Benjamin Chesterton
Benjamin Chesterton is a former dishwasher, cook, teacher and BBC Radio documentary producer. In 2008 he co-founded the company duckrabit with a view to marrying his passion for telling peoples stories with his love of photography. The company has evolved into making films and has worked on photography and film projects all around the world. He is currently working on a documentary about online child sexual abuse in collaboration with Interpol and the Human Dignity Foundation. Truth told Benjamin is best known for writing about the child abuse, racism and misogyny that he believes underpins the industry. Most recently Magnum Photos took their whole archive offline after he pointed out they were profiting from child abuse images.