What matters now? Proposals for a new front page

This wall, exhibited at The Aperture Foundation, reflects a series of conversations hosted by Stephen Mayes about What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page. The wall serves as a parallel to the discussions—as the ideas progressed, the wall progressed. Furthermore, while each conversation explored new themes in line with “What Matters Now,” each discussion built on the previous one, hence the physical layout of the overlapping panels.

The panels, themselves, also serve as a summary of the topics discussed during the five sessions. They highlight major themes and graphically explore ideas such as the media revolution or the move toward the “individualized front page.” The conclusion of the conversations, however, is best shown with the QR Code that sits to the left of the panels. Up close, the rectangular shapes of the code are really text explaining what matters now according to Mayes and his participants. From far away, the image turns into a QR Code, which, when scanned, links to a live search for news. This piece, therefore, embodies the group’s key conclusion that an active reader is what matters now.

-Rachel Loeb, Graphic Designer, Stephen Mayes’ Table

Click on the images to enlarge.

During the Opening Reception, Hosts Fred Ritchin, Stephen Mayes, Deborah Willis and Melissa Harris speak about their experiences working on this exhibition.

Wel encourage your comments, suggestions and involvement in response to their projects: you can leave comments on this website, or t email whatmattersnow@aperture.org.

Stay tuned for more information regarding future What Matters Now? events.

On Thursday September 15, Stephen Mayes invited Lewis Blackwell to his table, the group creative director of Getty Images. Here, Lewis discusses what he thinks matters now in journalism.

Deborah Willis invited photographer and video artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky to her table session on Friday, September 16th to join the discussion. Here, Karina speaks about the work she hung in the What Matters Now? exhibition.

Click here to see more of Karina’s work.

Fred Ritchin, Creator of What Matters Now?, brings his NYU class to Aperture Gallery and discusses his ideas for a New Front Page.

Fred Ritchin invited Garth Lenz to speak to his table on September 14, 2011. He proposed Lenz’s photographs of the Alberta Tar Sands as an example of the type of visual story that could grace a New Front Page. In this video, Lenz discusses his work while standing in front of the Tar Sands images.

See more at Garth Lenz’s wesbite here.

Deborah Willis invited guests Bridgette Auger, Marc Asnin, Phillipe Levy-Stab, Lorie Novak, Lina Pallotta, Alan Govenar, Alex Govenar, Kaleta Doolin, Lindsay Sabanosh, and spoke with (via Skype) Lewis Watts, Maya Joseph-Goteiner, Mecca Brooks and Roshini Kempadoo. The group was also joined periodically by people visiting Aperture Gallery.

You can join Deborah Willis’ final session on Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 am. See all events here.

The convergence of internet accessibility, online community building, and democratization of information has empowered a greater global consciousness. While this evolution has gone as far as sparking revolutions, we have just scratched the surface of its potential.

Brandon Litman, co-founder of One Day on Earth, launched a grassroots video project that grew into the world’s first truly global media collaboration. Via an online community built on open-source technology, Brandon and his team successfully produced over 3,000 hours of video from every country in the world recorded on the same day, 10/10/10.

At the center of the project is a feature film edited from an accessible archive of footage from the One Day on Earth shoot day but the real equity is the community of thousands of contributors. Brandon will discuss how he and his team have reengaged the global community to access information during the recent uprisings in the Middle East, among other significant international events.

Through a partnership with the United Nations and over 60 non-profit partners, the One Day on Earth community plans to continue to hold annual global filming events.

Liitman is an ongoing participant of What Matters Now? and has been joining the conversation at Wafaa Bilal’s table. View video from September 8th here.

Melissa Harris’ wall is a large corkboard presenting “reflections, ideas and responses from pen pals and other friends”

So far, she has added ideas from Gregory Crewdson’s Yale MFA class, Peggy Roalf, Fred Kaufman, Donna Ferrato, Yolanda Cuomo and others.

Fred Ritchin’s wall is covered with brown paper. After last week’s brainstorming session, his group sketched out a grid-like website to be the New Front Page.

On the opposite side of his space, Ritchin hung six photographs by Garth Lenz of the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada. It is an example of a type of photographic project that could go on the Front Page.

There are also public submissions directed to Fred Ritchin’s table. To submit to the public wall, or to any of the hosts click here.

Wafaa Bilal’s area has a digital projector for him to show his new myI app, and other websites during his sessions. On his wall, he hung photographs taken in Libya by Rachel Beth Anderson for the One Day on Earth project.

Deborah Willis’ area presents works of art by Marc Asnin, Lorie Novak and Lisa Levy.

This work by Lisa Levy shows front pages from the New York Times.

Stephen Mayes’ walls is a collaboration following the table sessions, designed by Rachel Loeb.

So far Mayes has a collage of many of their ideas for this project- a Gutenberg 2.0 as he calls it.

The article The Anxiety of Images in the most recent issue of Aperture Magazine, Aperture 204, pertains to What Matters Now? in many ways. The magazine Editors write, “The past ten years have been shaped in parts by conflicts, many of them visually articulated in unprecedented ways. Our project coincides with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks: an intensely photographed and videotaped event that unfolded in real time through images, and that provides the starting point of these discussions.”

The article has contributions by David Levi Strauss, Yasmine El Rashidi, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mark Sealy, Thomas Keenan, Atom Egoyan, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Willis, David Cole, Ariella Azoulay, Lynsey Addario, Fred Ritchin, Anne Nivat, Pieranna Cavalchini, Enrico Bossan, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Trevor Paglen, Paul Kaiser, Julian Stallabrass, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Tim Hetherington, Rasha Salti, Geoff Dyer, and Susie Linfield.

Melissa Harris, Editor in Chief of Aperture magazine and Deborah Wills will use the exercise demonstrated through the article in this season’s isssue as a staring point for this evenings conversation. Please join them in an informal and engaging media-oriented town meeting on Monday, September 12, 6:00 pm. As the backdrop, Harris and Willis have chosen to screen front pages from September 12, 2001, and yesterday, September 11 – 10 years later.

Stephen Mayes invited Noam Cohen, Aviva Michaelov, Ava Seave, Jonathan Worth, Bill Hunt and Rachel Loeb to his table for today’s discussion session.

As the What Matters Now? Hosts begin to fill their blank walls with ideas for a new front page, we have been documenting all of the action. Click here to “Like” Aperture on Facebook and see the photographs of the exhibition in the making.

Host Wafaa Bilal has a conversation at his table with Brandon Litman, Chris Boot and Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

They discuss Litman’s project One Day on Earth: “On November 11th, 11.11.11, across the planet, documentary filmmakers, students, and other inspired citizens will record the human experience over a 24-hour period and contribute their voice to the second annual global day of media creation called ONE DAY ON EARTH. Together, we will create a shared archive and a film.”

Interviews from September 8, 2011.

On Tuesday night, Wafaa Bilal premiered the project and app Myi, inviting the public to create a collective front page, building on the use of ubiquitous photography in modern technology as a key motivator and communicator for activism and information. As witnessed during recent movements in the Middle East, the Arab Spring became possible because people could send images or video directly to any server. Wafaa will be discussing the virtual platform and connectivity as related to the Arab Spring, and is inviting four dynamic journalists and activist to join him for the open conversation sessions.

The Myi project, developed by Wafaa Bilal, Shawn Lawson, and Mike Snyder, enables users to link their android or iPhone camera to a central server, their Flikr page, and/or personal website to simultaneously stream each new photograph. The Myi website is the central server where images can be experienced as the collaborative-collective stream. During Aperture’s exhibition, visitor’s are able to interact with the program, where images will be constantly projected and printed from Myi in Wafaa’s relaxed living room environment. Our hope is to established uncensored access for everyone to communicate their experiences to the world.

Wafaa Bilal will participate in an evening talk with Fred Ritchin on Tuesday, September 13 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Click here to see the full schedule for What Matters Now? events.

A welder wounded by an explosion of buried ammunition in the Customs Building © Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz was the sole photographer granted access to Ground Zero after September 11th. His series Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive documents the site in wake of the disaster, and is now being widely exhibited to commemorate a decade since the tragic event.

On Friday, September 9, from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Joel Meyerowitz will participate in What Matters Now? by hosting a roundtable in Aperture Gallery. His internationally lauded photography, as well as his involvement with the World Trade Center Archive, makes him a fantastic resource and catalyst for this ambitious project.

Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz have appeared in over 350 international exhibitions. He is a two-time Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of both NEA and NEH awards, as well as a recipient of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. He has published over fifteen books, including Cape Light (1978), Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks (Aperture, October 2009) and Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive (2006). He lives in New York and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery which will have an exhibition of Aftermath on view September 10 through September 17.

In a moment when narrative, both visual and verbal, is often meant to sum up, rather than to explore an event in all its meaning, idiosyncrasies and implications, stories and the process of story-telling “matter” more than ever.  The focus of our table will be story-telling – in  any medium – and the value of a narrative, in-depth content, characters, close observation of everyday life, and events unfolding in time and space, with nuance, context and history (as opposed to the current, more prevalent reductive, sound bite approach).

I see our table more in terms of a lab, as much as a collaborative unpacking of the process as goal-oriented, and therefore have invited my guests who teach–in workshops, in school–to bring their students if they wish.   What we do can take any direction, both in terms of what we discuss, and what we make– if people want to work more interdependently, we can create a multimedia “exquisite corpse” of sorts – either as we meet, or emailed to me in response to our conversations, or  a scrapbook, or a performance piece, or all of the above—or something else. Our “table” will be informal, fun, and salon-like.

-Melissa Harris, Editor in Chief, Aperture Magazine

Melissa Harris’ held her first table meeting this morning at Aperture Gallery. She invited a wide variety of guests to join the discussion, including Donna Ferrato, Yolanda Cuomo, and Fred Kaufman. To visit Melissa during What Matters Now? see full schedule here.

Evening Talk with Melissa Harris and Deborah Willis: Monday, September 12, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Technology is an integral part of human communication and each new technology changes not only how we communicate, but also what we communicate.  Consider the evolution of photography.  It started with the studied perspective of the plate camera, and evolved into the up-close “point of view” of 35mm; now it’s evolving into the immediacy of the cell phone, which is so much about sharing experience rather than documenting for record.  Each format changes the story that is told.  And the biggest shift of all is the move from analog to digital with all the associated implications for the creation, dissemination and interpretation of visual information.

Aperture kicks off its fall season with an exhibition unlike any other we’ve attempted before.

I think the public processing of the values of photography, in relation to what is happening in the world, is a timely and exciting project in its own right, and on behalf of everyone at Aperture, I’d like to thank Fred Ritchin and all the participating hosts for everything they are putting into it.

I have the strongest sense of the photography community being motivated by and engaged with issues of history and society. This isn’t new, but it feels like we are all – photographers, editors, creative people everywhere – in the process of reassessing our values, and re-prioritizing our commitments. This project aims to build on and contribute to that effort.

Whatever the outcome here (as yet unknown!) I am sure that what the photo community values now, more than ever, are places to come together, and meet, and talk—to engage with new ideas, and process issues together. I hope that Aperture will serve as a great place for that, physically, as well as online and in print, with What Matters Now? and many other projects in future. Arguably turning the space into a meeting place IS the outcome. We’re turning Aperture “inside out” for a moment. By which I mean: normally the editorial process is hidden away, behind closed doors, and only the finished result is on display. Here we are making the thinking and the decisions that make up the editorial process the subject of an exhibition, though “exhibition” may no longer by the right word. The decision-making process that leads to work on the walls is publicly accessible, open to public participation. Which is not to say that Aperture has decided to value the decision-making of “the crowd” as an alternative to that of talented individuals. This is a hybrid. One of the things that’s most exciting about the idea here is the balancing of the  input of public participants with that of the professional editor/curator. I think and hope this is an idea to build on. Wish us luck and please come and join in.

- Chris Boot, Executive Director Aperture Foundation

Chris Boot will join table host Stephen Mayes on Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 in conversation.
View full schedule of events here.

Fred Ritchin, writing for The New York Times’ Lens blog, asks Where is the Front Page in Cyberspace?

You have reached an experiment, an attempt to ask each other What Matters Now? We hope to be able to provide enough important answers to the question so as to create, in effect, Proposals for a New Front Page.

Why a new front page? Because with the enormous amount of information on the Web, with the billions of images available, it is hard to focus on what is important. There are few filters (curators, editors, advisors, consultants) to suggest what we should be looking at beyond what is left of the conventional media in order to better understand the world we live in. If these filters do exist they tend to be very imperfect algorithms (aka Google), not people.

If your house were on fire, would you depend upon a search engine to tell you what to do? And wouldn’t the same be true of the world—wouldn’t you want people who really know what they are talking about to recommend certain websites, projects, photos, videos, articles, music, etc., so as to know what is going on? And wouldn’t you want to participate, making your own suggestions based upon what you know?

After all, citizen journalism is not just people making pictures at demonstrations and disasters, but smart, informed people selecting from the enormous amounts of information available—in effect creating a new front page.

Maybe that way we will have more to talk about with each other. And maybe we will better understand our world in order to better know both how to enjoy it, and celebrate it, and help to fix it.

As this project begins on September 7 smart, informed people will be invited to join their hosts at six tables to discuss What Matters Now? And as they decide, each table will fill up a wall with imagery, video projections, multimedia projects, and other media. Everyone else is invited to stop by at the Aperture Gallery, to fill a seventh wall with their own recommendations (or to submit on this site and fill the column on the right), and to join the discussions that will follow this “Welcome” post here online. We will also be posting photographs of the seven walls as they evolve.

As Aperture approaches its sixtieth anniversary, as we remember the tragedies of September 11 ten years later, we welcome you to an inside-out exhibition, and to this website—an experiment in trying to push our media forward, and ourselves.

- Fred Ritchin