Photography Changes Everything: A Conversation at the Smithsonian, September 12, 2012

Photography Changes Everything harnesses the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums to trigger an unprecedented and interdisciplinary dialogue about how photography does more than record the world. Join Marvin Heiferman, editor; David Griffin, visuals editor at the Washington Post; Bruce Hoffman, director of security studies at Georgetown University; and Philip Kennicott, art and architecture critic at the Washington Post, for a lively discussion, moderated by Merry Foresta, founding director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, with a book signing to follow.

Watch the program live here.

More information is available at the Smithsonian American Art Museum web site.

Curator and writer Marvin Heiferman (editor) has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history in projects such as Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989). A contributing editor to Art in America, he serves on the faculty of both the International Center of Photography/Bard College and the School of Visual Art’s MFA programs in photography. He was creative consultant to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2005 to 2011, during which time he conceptualized and curated click! photography changes everything.

Art historian and author of numerous essays and articles on American art and photography, Merry A. Foresta (foreword), was the founding director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2000 to 2010. Prior to that, she was senior curator for photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her publications include Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (1998), Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (1992), Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (1995), and At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (2004).

David Griffin is Visuals Editor of the Washington Post. He oversees and coordinates the efforts of the Design, Photography, Video, Graphics and Digital teams in print and online. Previously Griffin was Executive Editor for E-Publishing at National Geographic where he led the editorial efforts of extending print publications into mobile formats, specifically the launching of their flagship iPad app. Prior to this, he was Director of Photography of National Geographic magazine where he oversaw their renowned team of contributing photographers. He has photo edited and designed a number books: Cuba by David Alan Harvey, two career books with William Albert Allard, Broken Empire by Gerd Ludwig, The Great Barrier Reef by David Doubilet, Ocean Soul by Brian Skerry, Orbit: Photographs of the Earth by Nasa Astronauts, National Geographic: The Photographs, and a series of topics with photographer Peter Menzel. He also directed the iPad app: 50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic. Griffin is active on the boards of the Eddie Adams Workshop, Look3: Festival of the Photograph (co-curated in 2012), the Virginia Quarterly Review, and is a nominator for the Prix Pictet.

Professor Bruce Hoffman has been studying terrorism and insurgency for more than thirty-five years. He is professor in Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where he is also the Director of both the Center for Security Studies and of the Security Studies Program. Professor Hoffman previously held the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and was also Director of RAND’s Washington, D.C. Office.  He was Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency between 2004 and 2006; an adviser on counterterrorism to the Office of National Security Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Iraq in 2004, and from 2004-2005 an adviser on counterinsurgency to the Strategy, Plans, and Analysis Office at Multi-National Forces-Iraq Headquarters, Baghdad. Professor Hoffman was also an adviser to the Iraq Study Group. In November 1994, the Director of Central Intelligence awarded Professor Hoffman the United States Intelligence Community Seal Medallion the highest level of commendation given to a non-government employee. He is the author of Inside Terrorism (2006).  His forthcoming book, Anonymous Soldiers: Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Palestine and the Rise of Israel will be published in 2013.

Philip Kennicott is chief art critic of The Washington Post, which he joined in August, 1999. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, in 2000, for editorials opposing a conceal-carry gun referendum in Missouri (which failed despite heavy support from gun-rights organizations), and in 2012 for criticism. In 2006, he was an Emmy Award nominee for a web-based video journal about democracy and oil money in Azerbaijan. He has also won a Cine Golden Eagle for his video work. In 2010 and 2012 he won the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors general commentary award. Kennicott now writes extensively about architecture and the intersection of architecture and culture. Kennicott graduated summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy from Yale in 1988. Prior to Yale, he spent two years at Deep Springs College, in California.