In Conversation: Edmund Clark and Erin Barnett

British photographer Edmund Clark and ICP Director of Exhibitions and Collections Erin Barnett discuss Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died.

Clark has spent ten years exploring structures of power and control in the so-called global War on Terror. Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died presents photographic, video, and installation work focusing on the measures deemed necessary to protect citizens from the threat of international terrorism. It also explores the far-reaching effects of such methods of control on issues of security, secrecy, legality, ethics, and culture.

Bios

Edmund Clark is an award-winning British photographer whose work links history, politics, and representation. He has received worldwide recognition for his work, including the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, a 2017 W. Eugene Smith Fellowship, and, along with Crofton Black, a 2017 ICP Infinity Award and the 2016 Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award. His work was the subject of major solo exhibitions, Edmund Clark: War of Terror, at the Imperial War Museum, London, and Terror Incognitus, at Zephyr Raum für Fotografie, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Manheim, Germany. He teaches at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London.

Erin Barnett, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, returned to ICP in 2016 after a brief hiatus. She had previously worked in ICP’s Exhibitions and Collections department for eleven years, where she organized, curated, and co-curated over 30 exhibitions and publications including The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet, Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945, President in Petticoats! Civil War Propaganda in Photographs, Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms, and Munkacsi’s Lost Archive. Barnett also conducted research on the collection, oversaw collection loans and rights and reproduction program, and co-taught an ICP-Bard MFA course on research methodologies and writing. She has also worked in the curatorial departments of the New Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. An alumnae of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program’s curatorial program, Barnett also holds an MA in the History of Art from the University of Kansas and a BA in Art History and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College.