The Concerned Camera: Unwavering Vision #3 and Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy
By Alan Govenar, Jean-Michel Sanchez, and Julien Roger
Multimedia installation, 2018
Produced by Documentary Arts in association with on-situ
Images of social and cultural change are indelible. They strike us with the power of visual reality, framed in an instant by photographers working to document the intensity of human experience. The Concerned Camera features two virtual exhibitions; one, Unwavering Vision #3, features 5,000 images of social and cultural change from the collections of the International Center of Photography (ICP), and the other, Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy, focuses on 1,000 images commissioned by the American philanthropist Anne Morgan to sensitize the American public to the humanitarian needs of people of France during and after World War I.
Unwavering Vision #3 and Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy present two distinct intuitive journeys, offering an interactive experience to explore the associations between and among thousands of images not usually seen together. By selecting one of the keywords associated with an individual photograph, a timeline stretches or contracts to show its theme distribution in the corpus of the installation. The user can thus summon hundreds of photographs by browsing 32 different timelines in Unwavering Vision #3 and 20 different themes in Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy. Each image can be enlarged and scrutinized in detail. The selection of a photographer’s name gives access to his or her images, as well as selected biographical elements presented through text, audio, and video excerpts. A panoramic projection faces the touch screen table. It creates a physical relationship between the public and the photographic collection, constantly renewing itself as a human-sized, immersive exhibition in new and unexpected ways.
Unwavering Vision #3 and Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy are part of an ongoing collaboration between ICP, Documentary Arts, and on-situ. This installation is supported by Community Foundation of Texas and the Florence Gould Foundation.
Unwavering Vision #3: 5,000 Images of Social and Cultural Change
Many of the images in the International Center of Photography’s collection illustrate what ICP’s founder Cornell Capa termed “concerned photography.” The photographers and their work demonstrate a humanitarian impulse to use pictures to educate and change the world, not just to record it. Over more than forty years, ICP’s collections have grown to encompass the history and diversity of the medium, from its beginnings to the present day. Unwavering Vision #3 presents both the tenacity of these “concerned” photographers and the commitment of ICP to open dialogue about image making, past and present.
Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy
Between 1918 and 1922, Anne Morgan, the youngest daughter of J.P. Morgan, worked to chronicle the relief efforts of the Committee for Devastated France (CARD), which she founded with Canadian physician Anne Murray Dike. Presenting 1,000 photographic images, digitized from glass-plate negatives from the collections of the Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, and Archives Photographiques au Fort St. Cyr, Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy documents the plight of refugees and the struggles of peasant life, in addition to highlighting the efforts of CARD volunteers to bring health and medical services, farming, libraries, and recreational activities to the war-torn Picardy region of France.
About Documentary Arts
Documentary Arts, Inc. is a non-profit organization, founded in 1985 by Alan Govenar, to present new perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. Documentary Arts’ collaborations with major institutions—including the National Endowment for the Arts, African American Museum (Dallas), FARO (Brussels), Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris), and UNESCO (Nairobi)—have highlighted little-known practitioners of cultural forms via photography, films and videos, audio recordings, oral histories, exhibitions, public programs, new technologies, and collections of material culture. The annual Documentary Arts Fellowship, now in its third year, enables students in ICP’s full-time programs (Creative Practices, Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism, New Media Narratives, and the ICP-Bard MFA) to deepen their practice in photography, video, and new media. Visit documentaryarts.org to learn more.