Upcoming: Future of Photojournalism Archives

Date:

Event Details

The CALMA-sponsored event, “Future of Photojournalism Archives,” will run from 9:30am to 11:30am PT on Wednesday, January 14th. It will consist of two portions, both of which will take place on Zoom:

  • A one-hour roundtable (9:30-10:30am PT) with three experts in photojournalism archives, including renowned photographer Christopher Morris, photo editor Kira Pollack, and photo conservator Alisha Chipman (biographies below). The roundtable will be open to the University of Washington community and will include time for questions.
  • A one-hour closed conversation (10:30am-11:30am PT) for MLIS students to speak with Morris, Pollack, and Chipman about the topics of the roundtable, as well as professional experiences.

The goal of this event is to explore the challenges surrounding digitizing photographers’ individual photo archives, making these archives searchable in new ways, and stewarding these archives through proper institutional support so that these archives can be utilized by the public.

Biographies of panel participants can be found below:

  • Christopher Morris is a renowned documentary photographer known for his powerful images capturing wars, social issues, and pivotal moments in history. After earning a degree in photography and a scholarship for its Advanced Studies Program from the International Center of Photography, Morris began his career with the Black Star agency. Throughout the 1980s, in his early work, he documented revolutions and conflicts ranging from the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua to the Colombian drug wars leading up to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. Here, he solidified his role in the industry by receiving a full-time contract with Time magazine to cover the world. This is where he spent the next thirty years, with the majority of that time continuing to cover conflicts, from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. In total, he covered over 20 wars in his career. While celebrated for his visceral and poetic war photography, Morris also redefined political photography during the George W. Bush presidency. He served as part of the White House press corps for nine years. His coverage led to his first monograph, My America, published by Steidl in 2006.

  • Kira Pollack is a visual story-teller who conceives and produces ambitious, large-scale multimedia projects across multiple platforms. She formerly served as Vanity Fair’s Creative Director and Deputy Editor; she worked as the Deputy Editor and also the Director of Photography at Time magazine; and she was Deputy Photo Editor for The New York Times Magazine. She is a two time Emmy award-winner and has been recognized twice by both the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Art Directors Club of America . She was named the Photo Editor of the Year by the Lucie Foundation. Pollack is known world-wide as a creative leader with an impeccable eye and an innovative vision who pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling. Her wide-ranging expertise encompasses enterprise journalism, documentary film, interactive media, social media, and all forms of photography. At Vanity Fair, she received acclaim for recruiting new and diverse photographers to shoot the magazine’s cover, including Collier Schorr, Dario Calmese, Adrienne Raquel and Maurizio Cattelan. At Time, Pollack’s tenure was marked by her continual innovation: She founded Red Border Films, Time’s first documentary film unit (now known as Time Studios); she launched the popular photo blog, LightBox; and she oversaw the curation of Time’s Instagram feed, amassing an audience of millions. She is a dynamic leader who finds and recruits diverse talents and builds effective and highly motivated creative teams. Pollack lectures on photography and storytelling at schools and conferences around the world.

  • Alisha Chipman is a senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress. Last year, she orchestrated a collaborative symposium on photomechanical printmaking and she is now conducting research for a book Photomechanical Prints: History, Identification and Care to be published by Getty Publications in 2029.