Long form writing: Magnum Foundation’s Photography Expanded
Photography Expanded Symposium at the Cooper Union in NYC. Photo: Liz Sanders (c) for Magnum Foundation.
I was asked by the Alliance for Media Arts & Culture to report on Magnum Foundation’s Photography Expanded symposium. I flew into New York City to take in a full day’s sharing out on contemporary collaborative practices in photography. There was a ton of substance on display. I counted myself lucky to witness it in one setting.
Before I attended, the Alliance told me this could be a highlights write-up. The reality was, there were over thirty-five presenters, and nearly all of them had substantial photography practices worth sharing. After looking at my notes, I opted for inclusion—to capture breadth, and to give as many practitioners some coverage. The result is this long-form article.
To their credit, the Alliance ran this at full-length. {Thank you Niema Jordan for line-editing, copyediting, and publishing this.} Magnum Foundation staff also expressed thanks for a full write-up. I believe the long read gives people who weren’t there a chance to experience the symposium. It also lets Magnum Foundation staff have their labor reflected back to them.
The deep dig
Above: Gemma-Rose Turnbull with Zohar Kfir, Nina Robinson and Sol Aramendi (left to right). Photo: Liz Sanders (c) for Magnum Foundation. Gallery photos by Megwen Cao and Liz Sanders (c) for Magnum Foundation and Hanul Bahm.
Is it harder to pare something to brevity and essence? Or is it harder to render something with enough fidelity to capture what happened? Honestly, both are hard.
One of the challenges of this write-up was the copious follow-up with presenters. Symposiums can present too many ideas and hard-to-grasp ideas. Details fly by fast onstage. This was a translation project in accessibility. And that required slowing down, digging deep, and committing to creating lightness out of density.
Gemma-Rose Turnbull, one of the presenters, was kind enough to recap my write-up on her website, Photography as a Social Practice. Hers is an awesome archive and dialogue-based research project on socially engaged photography. After the labor of writing this article, it was somehow restful to have my words reflected back to me.