Life Magazine, Chronicler of 20th-Century America, Rises Again

 

Via The New York Times

October 28, 2029

Nearly two decades after its last reincarnation folded, Life magazine is coming back to life.

"The iconic magazine, known for its red-box logo and devotion to visual storytelling, will start publishing again next month as a quarterly print magazine. It enters a fractured media landscape that is worlds away from the publication’s midcentury heights of acclaim, before the internet, social media and artificial intelligence upended the business model of magazine publishing.

But Karlie Kloss, the model and entrepreneur who is backing the project through her Bedford Media company, says the legacy of the brand deserved to be reinvigorated and brought into the 21st century. In addition to a website and a social media presence, Life plans to expand into short-form video, documentary films and events.

“What made Life extraordinary was its ability to make the world feel closer,” Ms. Kloss said. “And our responsibility is to preserve and to protect that legacy.”

Life magazine was started in 1936 by Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Fortune magazines. Its first issue featured on its cover a black-and-white photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of the concrete Fort Peck Dam in Montana, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It sold out instantly....

....A monument to the power of photojournalism, Life magazine documented mid-20th-century America, including World War II, the space race and the civil rights movement. It showcased the work of photographers like Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Gordon Parks, leading to indelible images like one of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945 and portraits of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. "

--full article here

Photojournalist Ron Haviv Urges Attention to Global Conflicts in Weatherhead Center Lecture

 Via The Harvard Crimson

By Leah Hwang, Evelyn J. Joung, and Abigael T. Sidi, Contributing Writers

Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv urged audiences to pay closer attention to conflicts around the world during the Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture on Thursday.

The lecture, titled “Testimony (1989-2026),” featured short films showcasing Haviv’s decades of photography documenting conflicts ranging from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I often am the one going towards the danger while everybody else is trying to flee,” he said.

The Jodidi Lecture, organized by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, is a recurring series launched in 1955 that has featured prominent figures involved in global affairs and humanitarian work.

Haviv’s film “Starved for Attention,” a documentary on childhood malnutrition spearheaded by Doctors Without Borders, was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 2012. He also co-founded the VII Foundation, a nonprofit supporting photojournalism and documentary work in areas of international conflict.

An exhibition of conflict photography featuring Haviv’s work opened in the basement of CGIS South earlier this month and will remain on display until Jan. 4, 2027.

The short films, assembled by independent filmmakers, paired Haviv’s photographs with audios from interviews and speeches. Haviv said he hoped the films would draw attention to international conflicts he believes are too often overlooked.

Haviv also emphasized the importance of intuition in photojournalism, saying his experience has taught him to anticipate geopolitical conflicts. A week before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Haviv flew across the globe to document the impending invasion.

“So many people — diplomats and pundits — said, ‘Oh, there’s no possibility that Russia will actually invade Ukraine,’” he said. “It happened. I was one of the people who believed that it could happen.”

Haviv acknowledged that critics have labeled his photography “war porn” and characterized his work as the “beautification of poverty.” He pushed back on those criticisms, arguing that he deliberately focused on aesthetics to encourage viewers to engage more deeply with his images.

“I want you to be able to see the photograph, because if you’re not going to look at it, what’s the point of me being there?” Haviv said.

Haviv also discussed how the modern media landscape has given photojournalists new ways to reach audiences by combining photography, video, and audio.

“A working democracy cannot exist without a working and educated media,” he said.

But Haviv warned that generative artificial intelligence could undermine audiences’ trust in photography. Asked whether he was concerned about the use of AI to manufacture images, he argued that the technology poses a threat to the credibility of photojournalism.

“If you don’t believe what you’re looking at, then there’s no point in me going off and telling stories,” he said.

The Kids Are Alright

 

Ryan Vizzions

The Kids are alright, Turnstile concert, Washington, DC, Oct 24, 2026

On Saturday, October 24, 2026 Turnstile took over the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  with a massive free show raising funds for Human Concern International’s relief efforts in Palestine, Sudan, and Lebanon. The benefit concert concluded Turnstile’s second North American tour in support of their Grammy-winning album Never Enough. 

Gallery photojournalist Ryan Vizzions documented the concert with one of his photographs going "viral" across the internet and social media.

"The Kids Are Alright" is now available as a limited edition fine art print.  The image is 24 x 18 inches, signed by Ryan Vizzions in a limited edition of 25.

Please contact the Gallery for further information.

Who Decides What Belongs in Public Spaces?

Via Karsh Institute of Democracy

 A new exhibit from the Karsh Institute of Democracy and UVA Library uses photographs of Confederate and other monuments removed across Virginia in recent years to explore questions of history, memory, and democratic decision-making. 

By Erin Tör

September 25, 2026

For generations, Confederate monuments occupied prominent public spaces across Virginia. They stood in parks, along avenues, outside courthouses, and on the grounds of the state Capitol. 

Then, beginning in 2020, that changed. Many monuments came down across the Commonwealth, including along Richmond's Monument Avenue and in downtown Charlottesville. Some were removed through formal government processes; others were removed amid protests and direct action. In Charlottesville, years of public debate and litigation preceded the removal of the city's Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statues in July 2021. Around the same time, other monuments that had become subjects of public debate were removed as well, including one depicting Revolutionary War military officer George Rogers Clark and another featuring Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea. 

Those changes are the focus of “The Monuments: Who Should Shape Public Space?”—a new exhibition on view in Shannon Library. Featuring photographs by Sanjay Suchak, a former Karsh Institute Practitioner Fellow in Democracy (2023–24), the exhibition asks visitors to consider what those changes reveal about a broader question: Who should shape the public spaces we all share? 

Suchak was there as monuments that had defined Virginia's public spaces for decades were removed. His photographs capture the physical process of removal and the people who gathered to watch.

“As a photographer, I think anytime something historical occurs that you've watched go from a community-developed idea to legislative action, you want to document that,” Suchak said. “For me, it was a way to process the events of [the Unite the Right rally on] August 11 and 12, 2017, in Charlottesville—a direct response to these removals being planned—and to feel like I could help contribute to the record of our communities.” 

The work often meant moving quickly and quietly. “To witness it firsthand was surreal,” Suchak said. “Nobody growing up in Virginia probably would have thought these things would come down, and then to be a part of it—meeting in secret locations—there was a lot of adrenaline, and an immediate realization that this is a significant chapter being turned in the history of our Commonwealth.” 

The photographs in the exhibit span Virginia. A timeline running along the floor provides historical context, tracing each monument from its installation, in some cases in the decades after the Civil War or tied to other chapters of Virginia's history, through the debates, protests, government decisions, and legal challenges that preceded removal. 

That longer history shows how communities have decided, and continue to debate, whose history is represented in shared spaces. Those decisions have often been contested, and some removals have since been reversed. The result raises questions not only about what belongs in public space, but also about who has the final say and how competing views should be weighed. 

“Taken both individually and collectively, Suchak's deeply compelling photographs provide human-scale opportunities for reflection,” said Meg Kennedy, curator of material culture and co-chair of UVA’s Art in Library Spaces committee. “Presented within their historical context, the images invite Library visitors to encounter and explore significant themes and reactions to memorialization.” 

Now several years removed from the events themselves, Suchak sees the photographs differently. “As we look back at the entirety of the movement, I want people to see the physical scale and emotion of this change in our community,” he said. 

The exhibition does not end with the removal of the monuments. Instead, it turns toward what comes next. 

As visitors end their walk through “The Monuments,” they are invited to contribute their own answers to a challenge at the heart of the exhibit: Going forward, how should people and events be memorialized? 

There is no single, simple answer. But the question points toward a larger conversation about the future of public space, and about how history, memory, community, and civic life shape the places we share. 

“The Monuments” is now on view in the third-floor gallery of Shannon Library.

View selected photographs here

"Seized" at The Santa Fe International Film Festival

 

Balancing the absurdity of small-town politics with the gravity of a constitutional crisis, SEIZED, set in the small town of Marion, Kansas, is thrust into the international spotlight after a police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner,

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026 2pm - info & tickets

SEIZED is a gripping, stranger-than-fiction investigative thriller that plunges audiences inside the troubling police raid on the Marion County Record. What begins as a shocking small-town incident quickly spirals into a national story, exposing how corruption, politics, and decades-long tensions turned a quaint Kansas community into a battleground over the First and Fourth Amendments. The film unfolds in real time through police body-cam and surveillance footage, revealing the raid’s chaos, the bombshells that followed, and the devastating personal toll on the newsroom, including the tragic death of its 98-year-old co-owner.

Director Sharon Liese allows the story to unfold with nuance, surprises, eccentric characters, and humor. By letting each voice speak for itself, she crafts a rare documentary in which sympathies shift moment to moment, revealing how truth, ego, and fear collide in real time. Blending the juicy intrigue of a classic muckraking narrative with a clear-eyed exploration of power, politics, and the fragility of a free press, SEIZED transforms a headline-grabbing event into a deeply human story that is urgent, unsettling, and impossible to ignore.

See article in the Santa Fe New Mexican: The First, Foremost: Documentary revisits police raid on a Kansas newspaper, shining a light on press freedom

Do you need to go to journalism school?

 Via LightHouse Reports

October 13, 3036

Last month we asked two early career journalists how they got in the field. This month we take the conversation to the other side of the classroom.

We speak to two educators from two very different corners of the field who are doing their best to prepare students for a changing industry landscape.

We discuss the pros and cons of formal training and the skills journalists need to be industry-read. It’s what you need to know to thrive in today’s media landscape.

Part 2 of a two-part series.

Interviewees:

Lam Thuy Vo, Associate Professor in Data Journalism, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (CUNY),

Investigative Reporter at Documented

Ron Haviv, Photojournalist and Co-founder of The VII Foundation

Hosts: Beatriz Ramalho da Silva, Tessa Pang

Produced by Lara Bodger

Sound design, mixing and editing: Elli Xypolitaki

Music by mobygratis

Reporting on the Health and Environmental Impacts of Data Centers: Panel With Nina Berman

 Via Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Online event

Monday, October 19  •  Starts at 10:30 AM MDT

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts. To report on these impacts journalists need to understand how air, noise and water pollution impacts human health, the way those pollutants are measured and how corporations are exploiting the permitting process to get their projects approved.

Reserve a spot

Panel

Nina Berman

Evan Simon

Jamie Banks

Michael Cork

Natasha De Jarnett

Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza

 

On Monday, October 12th, The Santa Fe Indigenous Center invites you to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza. This special event will hold space for tribal members from all Native Nations across Turtle Island to come together and celebrate Indigenous joy and cultural resilience on the Santa Fe Plaza beginning at 9AM through 4:30PM. 

Diné (Navajo) artist Eugene Tapahe's: ART HEALS The Jingle Dress Project and Standing Rock Movement exhibit will be on view at Monroe Gallery through November 1, 2026.

 

Stacey Patton discusses her new book "Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children" with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman

 Via Columbia Journalism School

Friday, October 9, 2026, 12:00 - 1:15pm

Registration required. Box lunch will be provided.

Columbia Journalism School, Brown Institute, 2nd Floor, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Dr. Stacey Patton discusses her new book with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman.


Strung Up examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.

Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.

Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.

Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.

This event is sponsored by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia University.

"POOL POSITIONS" Exhibit Features Gallery Photographer Anna Boyiazis

Via Kunstkreis Gräfelfing e.V.

October 8 – November 1, 2026

The exhibition features site-specific works by 30 renowned international artists inside a defunct indoor swimming pool. The installations, sculptures, and paintings inherently focus on themes of bathing, water, human body culture, and spatial perception.

The exhibit includes a special installation in the water, an interactive photographic series, videos in niches and adjoining rooms, photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and objects.

In this way, the walls, shower rooms, lockers, changing rooms, stairs and corridors of the place can be experienced by visitors as new experience spaces.

Vernissage

Thursday, 08.10.2026
From 6 p.m.
Admission is free.

Opening hours
every Thursday to Sunday from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
on Thursday, October 8, the exhibition opens with the vernissage at 6 p.m.

Exhibition Venue
Old swimming pool in the Lochham primary school
Adalbert Stifter Platz 1
82166 Gräfelfing

Anna Boyiazis is a documentary photographer working between Southern California and East Africa. Her work focuses on conservation, human rights, public health, and women and girls, drawing on long-term, community-embedded storytelling.

The Zanzibar archipelago, where the pictures were taken, is economically and spiritually closely linked to the sea. But half of its population does not dare to go into the water for fear of drowning!

While many boys acquire basic swimming skills by the age of 10, girls have so far been discouraged from learning to swim because there were no swimsuits to cover the body. Swimming lessons also challenge a patriarchal system that prevents women from engaging in activities other than domestic tasks.

Thanks to some grassroots organizations that provide full-body swimsuits and promote swimming lessons, women and girls are now taking to the water. The participants are thus empowered to teach others, creating a cycle that makes the sea accessible to all.

 

The Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture with Ron Haviv: Testimony (1989–2026)

 

Speaker

Ron Haviv, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and award-winning photojournalist. Director of The VII Foundation.

Testimony (1989–2026)

October 22, 2026

05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Harvard University
Tsai Auditorium (Room S010), CGIS South Building
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Register here

This event is open to the public and will be recorded. Please register to attend. There will be a public viewing of the exhibition and reception before the lecture, 4:00–4:45 p.m. Please plan on being seated at 4:45 p.m. as the event will start promptly at 5:00 p.m.   

Content Advisory: This presentation includes graphic photographs and video documenting armed conflict, violence, and their aftermath. Viewer discretion is advised.

For more than thirty-five years, Ron Haviv has documented many of the defining events of our time. Through a visual presentation, he explores the realities of conflict and the ethical, practical, and personal challenges of visual journalism, from Central America and the Balkans to the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and an increasingly polarized United States. 

Throughout his career, Haviv has focused on documenting human rights abuses and the consequences of war, including three genocides. Drawing on his experiences in the field, he reflects on the role of the photographer—as witness, observer, and, at times, participant—and explores the ethical responsibilities of documenting history as it unfolds. The lecture also asks what responsibility belongs to the audience. Is witnessing enough, or does seeing create an obligation to understand, remember, and act? 

The presentation weaves together a series of short films with commentary and stories from the field, providing context for the images and an inside look at the challenges and responsibilities of visual journalism.

Take a look at the work of visual artist Ron Haviv >

Chair

Melani Cammett, Center Director; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Identity and Conflict. Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Speaker Biography

Ron Haviv is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and an award-winning photojournalist. He co-founded VII Photo Agency and The VII Foundation, where he currently serves as a director. He is dedicated to documenting conflict and raising human rights issues around the globe.

Haviv’s first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering” by Newsweek. His other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul, Haiti: 12 January 2010, The Lost Rolls, and Shadow of Memory.

Haviv has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war covering over twenty-five conflicts and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H. W. Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention.

His work is in the collections of The Getty, Eastman House and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston amongst others and has been seen in numerous other museums and galleries, including the Louvre, United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, Fotografiska, and the International Center of Photography.

Haviv has co-created multi-platform projects for Doctors Without Borders’ DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef’s Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross’s World at War. His commercial clients include Ad Council, American Express, BAE, Canon USA, ESPN, IBM, and Volkswagen.

Haviv is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. 

He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, and The Charlie Rose Show. He has written opinion pieces for The Washington Post and The New York Times and spoken at TEDx along with numerous other lectures at universities and conferences.

Through the Lens of a Photojournalist: Power, Fear, and Photographic Record

 Via Principles First

Thursday, September 24 • 11 AM - 12 PM MDT

Reserve a spot here

Virtual Town Hall with Nate Gowdy

Join Principles First for a different kind of virtual town hall — one told through photographs.

Seattle photojournalist Nate Gowdy will share photographs and firsthand observations from two very different events he documented on the ground: January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and, five years later, federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis.

Gowdy photographed January 6 on assignment for Rolling Stone as a mob breached the Capitol and disrupted Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election. His book, INSURRECTION, is the only photojournalistic monograph devoted entirely to January 6, using timestamped photographs and contextual captions to chronicle the events on the ground as they unfolded.

In Minnesota this past January and February during Operation Metro Surge, Gowdy documented fear and uncertainty reaching into ordinary life—school pickups, grocery runs, work commutes—and residents organizing to observe federal agents, protest, distribute food, and care for neighbors.

These events are distinct. Having witnessed both, Gowdy will explore how power and fear take different forms—and how people respond when national events become immediate and personal.

The photographs begin the conversation. Gowdy will share what preceded and followed particular photographs, what he witnessed beyond the frames, and what he learned. Providing that context is part of his responsibility to the people he photographs and to the historical record—so the circumstances surrounding a photograph are not lost, distorted, or misrepresented.

See the photographs. Hear the stories.

Monroe Gallery Participates In Second Fall Of Freedom National Call For Creative Resistance

 

Monroe Gallery of Photography joins Fall Of Freedom with an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. On October 2,3, and 4 2026, plan to visit the exhibition Eugene Tapahe: ART HEALS, The Jingle Dress Project and Standing Rock Movement.

Additionally, in solidarity with of Fall Of Freedom, Monroe Gallery presents a Pop Up exhibition online of photographs documenting people struggling for their freedom; their right to live without fear, their right to speak and the right to protest inequities.

Tapahe documented the strength, unity, inspiration, resilience, and hope of the Indigenous-led movement that began in April 2016 to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.  He remembers the grace and courage of Jingle Dress dancers healing the trauma inflicted on the water protectors from  police and private security forces by water cannons, LRAD sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, mace, tear gas canisters and bean bag blasts. 

When asked “Why did you go to the Oceti Sakawin camp?”, Tapahe says “It was my responsibly to be there, to help our people, our ancestors, our water, and our land. It felt as if our ancestors were physically standing with us in unity around the sacred fire – singing and dancing with us. The spiritual awakening will be with me always as I continue my creative journey to photograph and document the beauty of Mother Earth and our people.”

Years later, Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project originated from a dream Tapahe had inspiring him to unite the land and people through the healing power of the Ojibwe jingle dress dance. The Jingle Dress Project has raised awareness of many Native American issues, such as land acknowledgment, women’s rights, and, most importantly, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).  

Eugene Tapahe

Strength In Unity, Tetons National Park, the native land of the Shoshone, Bannock, Gros Ventre, and Nez Perce People, 2021

Fall Of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping our nation. Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda.

Fall of Freedom returns for its second year — expanding the national call to creative resistance. FoF is an open instigation to artists, venues and institutions across all disciplines to put your work in the world on October 2nd, 3rd, & 4th, countering fascist repression and censorship with joyful communities of defiant creativity. Art matters. Courage is contagious.

National list of events.

Due process gutted. Universities threatened and defunded. Students kidnapped. Migrants deported. Troops deployed. Racism rampant. Cruelty celebrated. Political leaders arrested. Citizenship stripped. Health care shredded. Women's rights rescinded. Wealth concentrated. Free speech eliminated. Genocide normalized. Science undermined. Arts assaulted. Journalism targeted. Departments shuttered. Grants rescinded. Trans banned. Lawyers capitulating. Coup makers pardoned. Budgets slashed. Abortion outlawed. Courts stacked. Boards replaced. Police unleashed. Nazis emboldened. Bombs dropped.

This is why we must resist.

Eugene Tapahe Exhibit Highlighted in Pasatiempo "Fall arrives with a full slate of new exhibitions across The City Different"

 Fall arrives with a full slate of new exhibitions across The City Different

By Ania Hull

September 18, 2026

Eugene Tapahe (Diné) had a dream as the pandemic unfolded: He was sitting in a field of grass in Yellowstone National Park, watching bison, when he heard the sound of jingles. Then, jingle-dress dancers began appearing in front of him.

“It’s as if they were dancing with the bison to the rhythm of a silent drum,” Tapahe writes on the Navajo Strong website. “It was beautiful and peaceful.”

The jingle dress was used by the Ojibwe people to help cure the afflicted. Over the years, it has become a pan-Native American symbol of strength and resistance to Indigenous people outside the Ojibwe nation.

Together with his family and friends, Tapahe, a photographer and multimedia artist who often brings his work to the SWAIA Indian Market, decided to act on that dream.

He and his relatives formed the Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project (see “Saved by the Bells,” August 15, 2025). Photographs from the project are on exhibit through November 1 at the Monroe Gallery of Photography. Added to the exhibition are photographs that Tapahe took at the Standing Rock pipeline protests in 2016 and during demonstrations in Minneapolis this past winter.

Eugene Tapahe

Jingle Dress Dance, Standing Rock Camp (Highway 1806), ND, Native land of the Dakȟóta and Lakȟótiyapi people, 2016

Many of Tapahe’s photos show three or four Indigenous women in regalia wearing skirts or dresses with jingles. They pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.; in front of a temporary “Indianland” sign at Desert X, outside Palm Springs, California; in tall grasses at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming; in Monument Valley, Arizona; and at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

The colors the jingle dancers wear, especially the red masks, speak to the many social and political issues faced by the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, or North America, such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis.

One of the photographs is titled Granite and Grace and portrays the four jingle dancers in black and white standing in tall grass in front of El Capitán in Yosemite National Park, with a forest between the women and the rock. This is the home, the photograph notes, of the Nyyhmy (Western Mono/Monache) people.

Monroe Gallery co-owner Sid Monroe says what strikes him about the photo is that it speaks to the erroneously white-centered documented history of the American West.

“You look at this photo and you think of the canon of American photography,” Monroe says. “Ansel Adams, especially, who is said to have ‘opened up the West’ to the world. But his photos and how they were received didn’t take into account the Native people who were already there, whose land this is.”

Tapahe’s exhibition is among dozens of shows across The City Different’s galleries and museums that have recently opened or are scheduled to open this fall.

Inauguration of Mark Peterson's White Noise photographic exhibition on American white supremacism

 Via Babel Festival

September 17, 2026

Inauguration of Mark Peterson's White Noise photographic exhibition on American white supremacism, in the presence of writer Claudia Rankine.

White Noise is a series of photos initially conceived as a tool to investigate the divisive climate that had settled in the country in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election and captured the crescendo of white nationalism and autocracy that developed during his presidency. Peterson explored the White House's rhetoric on immigration and Islam and how it echoes nationalism, Western chauvinism, neo-Nazism and the ideas of all those who call for the creation of an ethnic state in America. Rankine founded the Racial Imagery Institute, where the exhibition was exhibited along with others on the dramatic effects of associating "whiteness" with the idea of universality and normality, even humanity.

In collaboration with Spazio 5b
Via Carlo Salvioni 5b, 6500 Bellinzona
Opening hours:

18 September 10:00-17:00
19-20 September 10:00-19:00
until 31 October by appointment:
+41 795235390 / info@spazio5b.ch

LIFE’s Everson Museum exhibit spotlights power of print media

Via The Daily Orange

September 16, 2026

For decades, Life Magazine’s mission was to give Americans a way to see the world through photographs, from notable political affairs and wartime scenes to family life and everyday moments.

Now, “LIFE: Six Women Photographers” brings that history to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, displaying photographs and issue snippets of Life Magazine, from six women who documented American life throughout the 20th century.

“It’s an interesting reminder that images have always been really powerful,” said Steffi Chappell, Everson’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and a Syracuse University alum. “Back when Life was first introduced, because of the way that it used images was so new, it blew everybody’s mind.”

The exhibition, organized by the New York Historical, is on display at the Everson until Sept. 27. It features the work of Life’s earliest female photographers: Margaret Bourke-White, Hansel Mieth, Marie Hansen, Nina Leen, Lisa Larsen and Martha Holmes, placing their photographs alongside the original Life issues where their work appeared. The black and white photos document both major historical events and ordinary American life from 1936-56. From photos of garment workers socializing and crowds surrounding a Yugoslavian president’s visit to the Soviet Union, the exhibit’s images capture a range of historical moments from the Great Depression to the Cold War.

Before the exhibit arrived at the Everson, Chappell knew Life’s role in shaping American society, but after research, she knew the magazine’s photographs would make a great addition to the museum.

For Chappell, the exhibition also provides an opportunity to consider what’s changed since Life’s popularity — and what hasn’t. It’s a reminder of the power of images and what print media “used to be,” making it suitable for the Everson, Chappell said.

When Life was established in 1936, its heavy reliance on photography distinguished it from other publications, Chappell said. The exhibition includes a prospectus that described the magazine’s mission as seeing and showing the world through images.

“It was all about the photos,” Chappell said. “And that was the first time that the American public has seen a publication like that. And so it was really, really impactful.”

Nina Leen’s 1947 photo essay, “American Woman’s Dilemma,” turned to the competing expectations placed on women in postwar and depression America. The photo essay presented three options for women with children: motherhood on top of a full-time career, full-time housework or part-time work alongside housekeeping.

Nearly 80 years later, Chappell said the questions raised by Leen’s photographs remain surprisingly familiar.

“It’s 2026 and we’re still having this discussion about working parents and should someone be staying home with the kids and is it OK for kids to go to daycare?” Chappell said. “Even though that’s from the 1940s, it still is shockingly current.”

Desi Drake of Liverpool was drawn to the Everson’s exhibit particularly because of Bourke-White’s work. Of all of the images on display, Drake’s favorite was Bourke-White’s shot of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana that appeared on the cover of Life’s inaugural issue in 1936.

Drake said she found it “amazing” that the photographs were taken by female photographers in the 1930s and noted the significance of a woman’s work being featured so prominently at the beginning of the magazine’s history.

Other photographers documented women entering traditionally male-dominated spaces. Hansen’s 1942 “The WAACs,” a series of photographs that showed the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps preparing for military support roles while also emphasizing expectations of femininity.

Similarly, Mieth’s series “Garment Workers at Play” documented women at work while capturing their relationships and social lives outside the factory, giving the series a playful and intimate quality.

“Every artist, photographer, painter, sculptor, always brings their own unique perspective, which is influenced by their background, their life experiences, where they grew up, who their family members were,” Chappell said.

The exhibition also draws attention to another person behind every published image: the editor.

While photographers controlled their subjects and which images they submitted, Life’s editors ultimately decided which photographs appeared in the magazine. Several photos in the exhibition didn’t actually end up in an issue of Life.

For Chappell, understanding the editorial process changes how visitors interpret the exhibition.

“If you go into the show and you don’t read any of the text and you just are looking at the images, you might not pick up on that idea that the photographers took the photos, but the editors were the ones that actually got to choose which photos were printed and which photos the public saw,” Chappell said.

The original Life issues displayed in the exhibition make that editorial process visible. Visitors can see the photographs in the context in which millions of Americans encountered them when the issues were first published.

For some visitors, the exhibition brought back memories of Life as a physical part of American society.

Loey Rotchforde, who lives in Syracuse, was reminded of the Life issues she used to see in thrift stores after attending the exhibit. She described Life as a “big cultural setter” and said the exhibit was a testament to “the power of print publications.”

Since Life’s establishment in 1936, society’s relationship with photographs has changed drastically, with images now dominating digital platforms and advertising, Chappell said.

The difference, Chappell said, is that photography was once a much newer and more concentrated form of storytelling. For Life’s first issue, founder and former Life editor-in-chief Henry Luce made the decision to put Bourke-White’s photograph on the cover. Bourke-White became not only the first female photographer at Life, but one of the first-ever photographers to capture numerous significant events.

“I don’t think he went into it thinking, ‘I’m going to put a woman photographer on the cover of Life Magazine. I’m just going to put the best photograph on the cover of Life Magazine,’” Chappell said.

Related: Margaret Bourke-White exhibit February 6 - April 26, 2026

The Monuments: Who Should Shape Public Space New exhibit features photographs by Sanjay Suchak

 

Now open on the third floor of Shannon Library at The University of Virginia:

Who decides what belongs in public space, and what do those choices say about our democracy?

"The Monuments: Who Should Shape Public Space?," a new exhibit from the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the University of Virginia Library, explores these questions through photographer and former Karsh Institute Practitioner Fellow Sanjay Suchak's images documenting the removal and current status of Confederate monuments across Virginia.

UVA Shannon Library

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

 

Robert E. Lee Monument Overhead, Richmond, Virginia, July 2, 2020

Foundry workers prepare to melt down the face of the Robert E. Lee statue for repurporsing, October, 2023

Mark Peterson Photographed "Trumpapalooza" for Vanity Fair

 Via Vanity Fair

September 11, 2026

Trumpapalooza: The Best Photos from the Republican Midterm Convention | Vanity Fair  click for full article

31 Extraordinary Photos From Trumpapalooza

President Trump demanded that Republicans hold a midterm convention in his honor, and that’s exactly what they delivered. Mark Peterson and Aidan McLaughlin traveled to Dallas, Texas, to capture the scenes.

Photographer Mark Peterson

9/11 In remembrance

 Via Pasatiempo

The Santa Fe New Mexican

September 11, 2026

 Tony Vaccaro, Minoru Yamasaki, World Trade Center Architect, 1969

Friday, September 11, marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, changing the United States forever and shuffling the world’s geopolitical makeup.

Before you get into the political fallout of the attack, I suggest you sit for a moment with the people who were in Lower Manhattan that morning and during the days that followed. They are people who lost their lives, witnessed the horror and survived, documented the tragedy, saved lives, attempted to save lives, and, years later, suffered from illnesses caused by hazardous dust.

One way to sit with these humans is to visit a virtual project on the Monroe Gallery of Photography website titled “9/11 In Remembrance.”

Gallery co-owners Sid and Michelle Monroe curated a Pop Up and online exhibition for the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in 2021, near the end of the height of the pandemic, by choosing 25 photographs that speak to the history of the World Trade Center: the before, the pride of the Twin Towers, the day of the attack, and the days that followed.

The photographers whose work is featured in “9/11 in Remembrance” are Tony Vaccaro, Eddie Adams, Carolyn Schaefer, Neil Leifer, Eric Draper, Eric O’Connell, Stephen Wilkes, Shepard Sherbell, Joe Blake, Joe McNally, Thomas E. Franklin, Nina Berman, and David Butow. — Ania Hull


See It: “9/11 In Remembrance,” Virtual Project, 2021, at monroegallery.com/gallery/virtual-projects.

9/11 25 Years Later: Photojournalist Eric O’Connell recalls being thrust into horror and history after living just a week in NYC

 Via AM New York

September 10, 2026

Eric O’Connell had been living in his apartment on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, next to historic Fraunces Tavern, for less than a week when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks struck the city. 

As a 33-year-old photojournalist and commercial photographer at that time, he had been working in various parts of the country, teaching and photographing for magazines and advertising stock. Because New York City is the American center of photojournalism, it was only natural for O’Connell to make a new home here. 

Like many others, O’Connell recalls hearing about the first attack on the World Trade Center that day while watching television.

“When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I saw it on the news – Matt Lauer and Katic Couric were preempted and they showed a picture of the building on fire (the north tower) – may be a Cessna hit it and I said, ‘ok, this is not an accident and my training kicked in,’” O’Connell said from his current home in San Antonio in an interview with this reporter, who had spoken to him for the first time in 25 years. “I grabbed my cameras and ran out the door.”

That’s when he said the metal doors on the building shook; he didn’t realize it at that moment, but that was when the second plane had hit the south tower. “It felt like an earthquake,” he recalled.

Despite having moved to NYC in July, O’Connell was not too familiar with the city. He had just spent July teaching in Italy and all of August in New Mexico teaching art. Nevertheless, he made his way to the World Trade Center, running down Broadway to Liberty Street, passing the black tombstone-like Deutsche Bank building.

Then O’Connell came upon the grotesque scene of horror: A piece of plane fuselage on a parking lot across from the south tower. A chunk of steel from the plane pierced the hood of a car. Gruesome body parts were scattered.

Then came the unthinkable: Jumpers.

“They (firefighters) were coming across the parking lot, and then I heard it. I saw something out of corner of eye; it finally registered that a body was falling,” O’Connell recalled. “Then I saw these guys running. Firefighters were dragging him, a firefighter hit by debris. I didn’t know at the time that a body had hit him.”

O’Connell had witnessed what this reporter had seen while covering that fateful morning: Firefighter Danny Suhr struck by a jumper. He ran around the corner and snapped a picture of him being removed in front of 90 West St. He then shot a few frames of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

“I was standing on the corner (of Liberty Street) where there was scaffolding and I thought, ‘Okay, this is barely safe – things were falling out of the sky,’” he recalled. “I took a picture of the church from the corner, and my instinct was that there was extreme danger. There were two cops there, one a female, and we didn’t know where to go.”

O’Connell had witnessed what this reporter had seen while covering that fateful morning: Firefighter Danny Suhr struck by a jumper. He ran around the corner and snapped a picture of him being removed in front of 90 West St. He then shot a few frames of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

“I was standing on the corner (of Liberty Street) where there was scaffolding and I thought, ‘Okay, this is barely safe – things were falling out of the sky,’” he recalled. “I took a picture of the church from the corner, and my instinct was that there was extreme danger. There were two cops there, one a female, and we didn’t know where to go.”

Eric O'Connell: Greek Orthodox Church and Towers, September 11, 2001

“Then we heard the rumble; we knew the building was falling and someone yelled, ‘Run!’” O’Connell recalled. “The female cop screamed, ‘In here!’ I chose to dive in, turned left and curled up in a ball.”

O’Connell had grown up in the southwest U.S., where his community sometimes suffered tornadoes. As the south tower fell, he remembered the advice his mother gave him when a twister approached: Get into the corner. 

“I headed to the wall, and the impact threw me in the air,” he recalled. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Please let it be quick.'”

As soon as the rumble of the collapse stopped, “only 10 seconds, I was sitting on my ankles with knees bent thinking maybe the building is on fire and I might die from the smoke,” he said. “I felt like I had three inches of talcum powder on my face. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “We can get out here.’ I also heard another voice say, ‘Over here.’”

He could not tell where the doorway was at first, the entrance to Liberty Street completely blocked by debris. Instinctively, he unscrewed the dust-filled filter from his camera and took a few photos, capturing a female police officer and in the background with this reporter.”

Eric O'Connell: The crowd, September 11, 2001

Once outside of the building, the street was dark and filled with dust. He made an important life choice.

“My early influences were all those journalism guys, like James Nachway and Anthony Suau (both famed war photographers), and I thought, ‘I’m not a Nachway or a Suau – I’m not a war photog,’” he said. “So I had a choice to turn right or left, and I turned left. I didn’t want to be one of those people.”

O’Connell then photographed a man in a dust-coated business suit. He took a picture of O’Connell with an instant camera next to an MTA bus. Then he made a joke that “disgusted” O’Connell. “Who do we sue?” the man had quipped.

O’Connell kept walking south and ran into an abandoned hot dog cart.

“I grabbed a water and as soon as I did, a different female cop put her hand on my shoulder, pulled me towards her and said, ‘you need to wash your face,’ so she dragged me to a water fountain, and she pressed the button for me. She then disappeared and I kept walking.”

He said a few guys had a transistor radio on top of car, listening to the news. He said he thought about the movie “Red Dawn,” and thought about the country being under attack as happened in the film.

By the time he made it to Battery Park, he turned back when he heard another rumble, and “I saw an enormous cloud of dust and smoke,” the collapse of the north tower.

“I started to understand what may have happened, but I just didn’t know what to do so I went home, (to his apartment on Pearl Street) and I saw the pictures on television. I took my clothes off. I knew my life had changed forever,” he said.

After cleaning up, he went back out and walked a woman across the Brooklyn Bridge; “she was terrified to walk across,” O’Connell recalled. He went to a friend’s house in Brooklyn to get food and some sleep.

“I tried to sleep but I kept waking up because I was having a nightmare of falling – I’d He brought his processed film to Time Magazine the next day, but because he had shot it on black-and-white film, they weren’t interested. He later sold the images to CNN and “60 Minutes” and gave and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church — which had been destroyed in the Twin Towers’ collapse — a photo to help them raise money to rebuild.

Eric O’Connell showing photos in an exhibit in 2021 at Monroe Gallery of Photography for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Photo shows last picture of the Greek Orthodox Church crushed in the collapse.

(Photo Courtesy of Eric O’Connell)

O’Connell said he sometimes regrets not having done more on that “historic moment.” But he was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that so many also experienced. He never returned to the site: “I couldn’t even go down there.” He said he didn’t leave Manhattan for a year.

“I was scared to leave – didn’t think I could come back – I was in a red zone, and so when I finally did leave, I’d make sure to take my insurance card, or utility bill, to show where I lived. I was just angry about stuff – I had just moved to New York City,” he said. “I chose to turn my back on it; I didn’t have that connection to all those people – I only had a few friends.” 

Now living in San Antonio, he continues to work as a photographer, but also works part-time for Parks and Recreation and rides his bike on the greenways, “like the West Side Highway along the river.”

One of the guys he rides with is a retired NYPD officer, “the only person he knows who speaks about 9/11.”

Exhibit: 9/11 In Remembrance