Bending the Frame with Fred Ritchin

Join the Wisconsin Book Festival and PhotoMidwest for an opening lecture with Fred Ritchin at the Chazen Museum of Art.

Ritchin will discuss how photographic images can be used to effect positive societal change. The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events with the hope that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Ritchin’s 2013 book Bending the Frame addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media to impact society.

Fred Ritchin is professor and associate chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and codirects the Photography and Human Rights Program at NYU with the Magnum Foundation. He also is director and cofounder of PixelPress, which works with humanitarian groups to develop visual projects dealing with social justice issues. Ritchin has written for Aperture, Le Monde, the New York Times, and the Village Voice, and authored several books, including the prescient In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990), After Photography (2009), and Bending the Frame (Aperture, 2013).

For more information, visit wisconsinbookfestival.org