Moving Walls InternationalAbout Moving Walls International
Moving Walls: A Documentary Photography Exhibition
Curated by Susan Meiselas and Stuart Alexander
Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
Though photojournalists work on assignment, illustrating news stories for newspapers and magazines, they also pursue independent projects, using photographs to bring attention to human rights and social justice issues that are overlooked by mainstream media outlets. Photography is a way for them to express their commitment to these issues and advocate for the people in their images.
Documentary photography is often misunderstood as a genre that captures reality only, free from subjective interpretation. However, the strongest documentary photographers combine the reporting skills of journalists with the aesthetic freedom of artists, rendering every “documentary” photograph a personal interpretation.
Moving Walls: A Documentary Photography Exhibition is an international exhibition curated and sponsored by the Open Society Institute, a private operating and grantmaking foundation based in New York City. The work of seven photographers, culled from over 60 whose photographs have been shown in Moving Walls exhibitions in the United States, has been selected to tour the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
Though the photographs in this exhibition cover diverse regions and issues, each photographer explores how stylistic choices shape his or her work—and its effectiveness. Moving Walls: A Documentary Photography Exhibition features portraiture, collaborative projects, social documentary work, photo montage, and war reportage. Lori Grinker pairs portraits of veterans with their own words to explore the aftermath of war. Likewise, Eric Gottesman collaborates with his subjects to create portraits that reflect how people living with AIDS perceive themselves. Gary Fabiano, Andrew Lichtenstein, and James Nubile utilize photo montage; by juxtaposing images of people, objects, scenes, and words, they present composite narratives of social and political issues. Aleksandr Glyadyelov and Edward Grazda pursue projects in communities to which they personally connected; Glyadyelov, the son of a Soviet army officer, makes pictures in Ukraine, where he has lived since 1974, while Grazda, after spending years working in Muslim countries, returns home to photograph Muslims in New York.
The photographers in this exhibition use diverse techniques to reveal more than can be conveyed in a single image on the front page of a newspaper. They encourage the viewer to study a body of work, to consider what it says, and—if inspired or provoked—to act. The exhibition, together with concurrent public programming and training workshops for local photographers and students, seeks to create a cross-cultural dialogue about the medium of documentary photography and its potential to effect positive social change.
