WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Empathy As A Perspective with Anne Wilkes Tucker

 

The Democratic Lens Scholar Lectures

Examining how images have shaped America’s collective memory and inspired individuals to participate in civic life.

Sunday, November 20

Livestream and La Fonda on the Plaza, Lumpkins Ballroom 100 E. San Francisco St. Santa Fe, NM 87501

Lectures are free and open to the public. Attend live online or in person at Santa Fe's La Fonda on the Plaza Hotel.

10-11 am | Photography & Restitution: The Civil Potential of the Image with Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Yale University

11-12 pm | WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Empathy As A Perspective with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator Emerita, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

12-1 pm | What Can’t Be Unseen: Photography & Activism with Kymberly Pinder, Ph.D., Dean, Yale School of Art, Yale University

1-1:30 pm| Q&A with Moderator Will Wilson, Photographer & Program Head of Photography, Santa Fe Community College

Reserve here

Anne Wilkes Tucker is one of the four authors of War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, a 612-page survey of images made of wars, from the Crimean War (1853-1856) through the Iraq War (2003-2011). The 2012 book was produced to document Tucker’s monumental exhibit of images of war at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Tucker will speak on War/Photography: Empathy as a Perspective as one of three scholars presenting at a Nov. 20 Review Santa Fe symposium called The Democratic Lens: Photography and Civic Engagement, sponsored by CENTER and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The symposium is free and can be attended online or in person.

Tucker will discuss how empathy plays a largely unexamined role in war, including for photographers who become involved with their subjects after photographing them. For example, one Los Angeles Times photographer took time off from his job to take a soldier he had photographed who was suffering from PTSD to a rehabilitation center and stayed with him for a month, Tucker says.

“I just want people to understand, when they get all ‘rah-rah’ about war, that the war doesn’t end for soldiers,” she says. “There is still a soldier a day in the U.S. who kills him- or herself.”