Photography, Collaboration, Community:
A Workshop and Artist Residency with Wendy Ewald and Frédéric Brenner
October 31–November 18
This term the UVA Jewish Studies Program and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion welcome two internationally acclaimed photographers to Grounds for a series of public conversations, a student workshop, class visits, and an exhibition of student work. Photography, Collaboration, Community examines photography as a collaborative practice that can shape and empower communities while at the same time recalibrating the relationship between global art and local political conflicts surrounding war, migration, and refugeedom in Europe and the Middle East. Through public conversations with the artists and academic scholars and student teaching and interaction, Photography, Collaboration, Community explores the international photographer’s complex relationship with others, including the photographer’s “gaze” and its potential to violate, exclude, or reinforce differences.
Photography, Collaboration, Community seeks to convene scholars and students for open inquiry and respectful dialogue about complex issues of the artistic representation of global and local in the contemporary world.
The project began in Spring 2022 with an online workshop in which Brenner taught students the art of narrative photography, culminating in an exhibition of student work in Nau Hall. It continues this fall with an in-person residency of Brenner and Ewald. During their time at UVA, they will offer another student workshop, and participate in a series of three public conversations about three core themes, each of which examines symbolic sites around the world in which complex issues of religion, nationalism, and media combine to form iconic meeting points of the global and the local: Engaging Communities: Photography as Collaboration, on Nov. 3, co-sponsored with MESALC, Religious Studies, and the Page-Barbour Fund; Strange Places: The Anthropology of Documenting Diaspora, on Nov. 14, co-sponsored with the Center for European Studies and the German Department; and Intimate Fragments: Zerheilt—The Performance of Jewishness in Berlin, on Nov. 17, co-sponsored with German Studies, the Center for German Studies, and the Center for European Studies. Following these public events and the workshop, Ewald will return in Spring 2023 to mount a public exhibition of student art created during fall 2022.
Photography, Collaboration, Community has been coordinated by Professor James Loeffler, Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of Jewish Studies, and Professor Asher Biemann, Co-Director of the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion. They are joined on the Organizing Committee by Professor Vanessa Ochs (Religious Studies/Jewish Studies), Professor Caroline Kahlenberg (History/Jewish Studies), Professor Daniel Lefkowitz (MESALC/Anthrpology), and Professor Jeffrey Grossman (German/Jewish Studies).