Concept Album: Photography in Writing and Curation (Online Symposium)

1:00 PM

Track 01: Writing a Photobook

With Carlos Loret de Mola, Fernando Gallegos, and Freddy Martinez. Introduction by Amy Touchette

Fernando Gallegos is an editor and designer of photobooks with a background in literature and cinema, based in Monterrey, Mexico, and has worked on notable books by Alejandro Cartagena and several other Latin American photo artists and visual authors. Carlos Loret de Mola is a photographer and co-publisher of Los Sumergidos, an international creative collective based in New York and Mexico that produces and distributes photography-based art publications and related projects, of which Gallegos is also a founding member. 
 

Regular collaborators in book production, Gallegos and Loret de Mola will discuss and present the literary and cinematic influences that shape how Gallegos creates photobooks with artists/authors. They will be joined by writer Freddy Martinez, also an original member/author of Los Sumergidos, an editor at Aperture, and a founder of the New York-based arts collective GAUCHE, for what promises to be an entertaining and enlightening conversation about the intersections of literary and visual language in book form.

2:00 PM 

 Track 02: A Basket of Hammers

With Odette England

Odette England is a photographer, writer, and educator. She is the author of six books, including 2021's Dairy Character, a loose chronicle of her experience growing up on a dairy farm in southern Australia (published by Saint Lucy Books); 2024's The Long Shadow, a photo-textual study of the life and work of the American photographer Marion Post Wolcott (published by Libraryman); and, most recently, her first photo-novella Isn't X Beautiful! (published by The Ice Plant). She will discuss these and other projects at the intersection of photography and literature, including her forthcoming second novella and an experimental re-telling of Susan Sontag's On Photography.  

3:00 PM

 Track 03: Words, Pictures, and Videotape

With Nina Strand, Lillian Davies and Catherine Taylor 

Nina Strand is an artist and founder of Objektiv Press. She will present her publications juxtaposing text and image, the press's essay series on photography, and Afterimage, an ekphrastic column on the press's web journal where different people are asked to describe the image that lingers in their mind. As the sea of images continues to swell, the series explores which visuals linger and take root in today's endless stream, much like a song that plays on repeat in your head. The talk will also include a recorded piece in which Strand and the writers Lillian Davies and Catherine Taylor read from their new book Paragraphs, which brings together image and text. 

4:00 PM

 Track 04: Afterword

With Alan Huck and David Campany

ICP’s Creative Director David Campany and Program Lead Alan Huck with conclude the day’s sessions by reflecting on the considerations that drive the Writing and the Photographic Image Program. 

11:00 AM 

Track 01: Beautiful Men—Photography, Desire, and the Reimagining of Masculinty

With Debmalya Ray Choudhuri and Dimitri Stefanov. Moderated and organized by Velina Stefanova and Gene Tolan

Join photographers Debmalaya Ray Choudhuri and Dimitri Stefanov for an intimate conversation about masculinity, photography, and desire through the interconnected ideas of Inheritance, Intimacy, and Appearance. Beautiful Men asks how masculinity is learned and embodied, what intimacy can unsettle, and ultimately, who is permitted to appear differently.

12:00 – 12:15 PM

Break

12:15 PM

Track 02: Who Carries Memory Forward?

With Anurag Banerjee, Veejay Villafranca, and moderator Veeranganakumari Solanki. Organized by Sumit Bhattacharya and Abby Madriaga

Bringing together photographic practices from India and the Philippines, this conversation explores memory as something continuously constructed through place, identity, culture, and lived experience. 

1:15-1:30 PM

1:30 PM

Track 03: Photographic Vision and the Experience of Place—From Personal Perception to Environmental Responsibility

With Morten Andersen and Marine Lanier. Moderated and organized by Cathrine Wessel and Julien Galland

Two interconnected questions about the photographer’s personal relationship to place: to what extent does a particular environment shape the photographer, and to what extent does the photographer shape our understanding of the landscape? 

2:30-3:00 PM

3:00 PM

 Track 04: Photography at 200: Who Writes the Archive?

With Sagrario Berti and Costanza De Rogatis. Moderated and organized by Mariana Mendoza

On the occasion of photography's bicentennial, researcher Sagrario Berti and artist Costanza De Rogatis examine the photographic archive as a contested site of power. Berti traces how a Latin American photographic collection was organized and interpreted differently under private and public ownership; De Rogatis reactivates archival images through Piel y manos, developed in collaboration with deafblind participants. Together, they ask who builds the archive, who is represented within it, and who gets to reinterpret it. 

4:00-4:15 PM

4:15 PM

 Track 05: After Visibility 

With Krista Svalbonas and Wiktoria Michalkiewicz. Moderated and organized by Katie Tackman and Emese Mucsi

This conversation explores how curators and institutions can support artists beyond visibility, with a particular focus on American and Eastern European photography and the points of convergence within the regions’ intertwined histories—political transformations, conflicts, and forms of resistance—while preserving artistic autonomy and the complexity of individual practices. Through solidarity and cross-cultural dialogue, the conversation asks how locally rooted artistic practices can achieve meaningful and sustained international visibility, and what examples of this kind of advocacy, and artist management can inform responsible curatorial practice. 

5:15 PM