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Past Exhibition:
Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women
March 1 - May 26 , 2007
Press Release: Read text here / Download PDF here / View Images here
© Arab Image Foundation, BeirutA 1940s Hollywood glamour girl wannabe in Egypt throws a practiced ‘come hither’ look over her bare shoulder at the camera. A serious young Lebanese woman poses for a portrait dressed like an English gentleman in a pinstriped suit. The Arab pop music equivalent of Charo wears a traditional headscarf with a wry expression. These images and more gleaned from the archive of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut are the subject of a fascinating new multimedia installation entitled "Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women" on view at SF Camerawork. Using a soundscape of recorded voices, projected large-scale images and photographic prints, the installation unveils stereotypes and examines how the authority of photography can get lost in translation. This is the only U.S. venue for this thought-provoking show curated by local art historian and critical theorist Dore Bowen and French media artist Isabelle Massu.
Notes SF Camerawork’s Executive Director, Sharon Tanenbaum, “Living here in the U.S., and particularly since 9/11, our viewpoints of the Arab world are very limited to the pictures we see in newspapers, television, and Hollywood movies,” she says. “This installation blows our stereotypes out of the water, showing a completely different side of Middle Eastern photography and Arab women in particular. Here we see them relaxing with friends and family. Many are without veils and some are scantily clad.”
This exhibition will be accompanied by the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, with essays by Dore Bowen, Tarek El-Ariss, Arlette Farge, and Paul-Emmanuel Odin.
SEEING BEYOND SIGHT:
Photographs by blind teenagersAuthor Reading: April 5, Cody's Books, 2 Stockton Street
The exhibition Seeing Beyond Sight is the product of Sound Shadows, a literacy-through-photography class taught by Tony Deifell, Shirley Hand, Dan Partridge and Jessica Toal from 1992 to 1997 at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC. Even before you know that these pictures were taken by blind teenagers, they are striking in their use of light and composition, and haunting in their chiaroscuro intensity. Accompanying the images are the students’ own words and captions — in which we see how much the taking of pictures came to mean to them and how the creative process works in ways rarely experienced. With its ambitious, seemingly paradoxical premise, Seeing Beyond Sight challenges our definitions of art, vision, and perception and what it really means to see.
For more information please visit http://www.seeingbeyondsight.org.
Read the review of Seeing Beyond Sight in The New York Times Sunday Book Review: http://www.seeingbeyondsight.org/book/NewYorkTimes_BookReview.html
IN THE BONINO EDUCATION CENTER
March 1 - May 12, 2007
Her + Him - Van Leo
A film by Akram ZaatariRunning time 32 minutes
AT THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM
(121 Steuart Street)
May 10 - May 20, 2007Exposing Identities
Press Release: Read text here / Download PDF here
SF Camerawork’s First Exposures mentorship program provides urban teens with an opportunity to develop photography skills and explore the medium as a form of self-expression. At the beginning of the academic year a group of 15 diverse students, recruited from local agencies serving young people with backgrounds of homelessness or low-income living situations, were paired with professional photographers who mentor them in the development of their own photography skills. Since February, The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) and SF Camerawork have been partnering on a curriculum for a series of workshops based on the themes in the CJM’s current exhibition, The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography. Using the exhibition as a springboard, students will embark on their own photographic investigations of issues of identity, including culture, religion, and race culminating in the exhibition, Exposing Identities, on view at The Contemporary Jewish Museum May 10-20, 2007.
For more information, please visit www.thecjm.org.
