As people take to the streets in solidarity with Black communities to protest police brutality and racism, many within the photography community are questioning previous ethical frameworks around documenting protestors in public. With concerns growing over the misuse of facial recognition technologies used to target and potentially endanger activists, how do photographers approach privacy concerns, consent, and prioritize safety while also documenting history?
Join ICP for a conversation examining these questions with New York Times Photo Editor and Diversify Co-founder Brent Lewis; photojournalist Joshua Lott; Authority Collective Co-founder Tara Pixley; PhotoShelter Co-founder Allen Murabayashi; and scholar Cara Finnegan (moderator) to explore how photographers are navigating this critical moment.
This program is free but registration is required.
About the Program Format
This program will take place on Zoom. Those who register to attend will receive a confirmation email with a link located at the bottom of the email under ‘Important Information’ to join the lecture through a computer or mobile device.
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Speaker Bios
Tara Pixley, PhD, is a Los Angeles-based visual journalist, writer, and professor with 15 years of experience as a photojournalist and photo editor for news media. Pixley’s writing and photography has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, ESPN Magazine, CanonPro, and the Black Scholar. She is a co-founder and board member of Authority Collective—an organization dedicated to diversifying perspectives and inclusive practices in visual media. She is also currently working on a book chronicling the move to decolonize the visual journalism industry.
Cara Finnegan, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies the role of photography in public life. Finnegan is the author of three books of photography history, along with numerous articles and reviews. Her latest book, Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital, will be published by University of Illinois Press in 2021. Since 2018 Finnegan has co-hosted Chatting the Pictures, a webcast analyzing key news photos of the week that is produced by the non-profit media literacy site Reading the Pictures.
Brent Lewis is a photo editor based out of New York City and co-founder of Diversify.Photo, and is from the South Side of Chicago. Lewis is a photo editor at the New York Times working on the business desk, assigning visual coverage of technology, the economy, and auto industry. Brent was a photo editor at the Washington Post. Formerly, he was the senior photo editor of ESPN’s The Undefeated, where he drove the visual language of the website that is based around the intersection of sports, race, and culture. Before joining the turning his life over to photo editing, he was a staff photojournalist with stints at the Denver Post, the Rockford Register Star, and the Chillicothe Gazette. Through the years his photos have been used by the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Forbes, and Yahoo! News.
Joshua Lott is a photojournalist based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Reuters, Getty Images, Agence France Presse, and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, and Politico. His passion for documenting politics dates back a decade when he started covering news assignments in his hometown of Chicago. Leading up to the 2008 presidential election, Lott spent nine months in Iowa and later covered the campaigns in South Carolina, Florida, and Wisconsin. Between 2009 and 2013, he was based in Phoenix, Arizona, where he covered Arizona's immigration crackdown, the Mexican border, wildfires, and the Tucson shooting. As the nation has turned its attention to Detroit in the wake of its bankruptcy, Lott has covered news assignments out of the city for over a year. He is available for assignments around the country.
Allen Murabayashi is the chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter. He was a founding employee of hotjobs.com and helped it grow from a four-person start-up to a publicly held company while serving as its SVP of Engineering. He previously served on the board of the Eddie Adams Workshop and has been a judge for the Audubon Photography Awards for the past three years. He has written numerous articles on ethics and photography, and in 2014 received an NPPA special citation for his continued advocacy of photojournalism. Murabayashi received a B.A. in Music from Yale University and hails from Honolulu, Hawaii.
