Outreach & Advocacy: Putting Images to Use
Panel Discussion
Photographers passionately committed to social concerns will explain their strategies for using their visual storytelling as tools for advocacy, education, and empowerment. They will discuss how collaborations with subjects and community partners help to amplify underrepresented stories, reach new audiences, and deliver calls to action.
Participants include Deborah Espinosa, CENTER Fiscal recipient, Peter Merts, CENTER Social Award recipient, and Meridel Rubenstein, CENTER Project Launch Grant Honorable Mention recipient in conversation with Holly Stuart Hughes, Independent Editor, Writer, and Grant Consultant.
WHEN • October 14, 2021, 2 - 3:30 PM MT
WHERE • Hosted online through Zoom – Watch the recording
HOW • Free and Public
Image detail of “A theatrical exercise, in a classroom at Solano State Prison”, from the series Incarcerated Artists © Peter Merts
Moderator
HOLLY STUARY HUGHES is an independent editor, writer, and grant consultant. The former editor-in-chief of PDN (Photo District News), she has organized panels and lectured on artists’ rights and the business of photography around the U.S., and served as a portfolio reviewer at several photo festivals. A graduate of Yale, she has written on photography and media for Time.com, The Telegraph, Multichannel News, Taschen Books, American Photographic Artists, Magnum Photos, Carlton Publishing, and Blouin ArtInfo Media.
Panelists
DEBORAH ESPINOSA is an artist and attorney who combines her legal and multimedia storytelling skills to help advocate for the rights of people from poor and marginalized communities in Washington and the global south. She also works to strengthen those rights by providing legal technical assistance to state and national governments, primarily in Africa. She believes that multimedia storytelling is one of the most compelling advocacy tools for reform of unjust law.
PETER MERTS has been photographing for several decades, specializing in documentary, portrait, and fine art forms. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek Online, and others. Some of Peter’s prison arts photography was funded by the California Arts Council, which administers the state’s Arts in Corrections program. In 2015, Peter and Dr. Larry Brewster published Paters of Discover–Art Practice and Its Impact in California State Prisons (second edition). In Spring 2022, Daylight Books will publish a monograph of Peter’s prison art photographs.
MERIDEL RUBENSTEIN began her professional career in the early 1970s, evolving from photographer of single photographic images to artist of extended works, multimedia installations, and social practice. In 2021, two of Meridel’s photographs – Penitente and Fatman with Edith – were added to the Museum of Modern Art [MOMA] photography collection as part of the Helen Kornblum Collection of Women Photographers.
Recorded video link not working for you? Here is a direct link – https://vimeo.com/637765984
Supporters
CENTER would like to thank those who make the Review Santa Fe programs possible: The Gumbo Foundation, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the City of Santa Fe Arts & Culture Department, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Mexico Humanities Council and photo-eye.
