Deep Reads on the Impact of Innovations in Photography

At our Media Impact Focus: AIM and Shoot event, we’ll take a long look at the ways in which new technologies are opening up fresh opportunities for photographers to connect and collaborate with audiences.
To shed light on these shifts, three of our speakers have assembled a shortlist of relevant readings—Amy Yenkin, the director of the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Project; Susan Meiselas, the president of the Magnum Cultural Foundation and a critically acclaimed photographer, and Sara Terry, the founder and artistic director of The Aftermath Project.
Read on:

• • Aperture — Documentary, Expanded
    Meiselas guest-edited the spring issue of this noted photography magazine, with essays and images revealing how photographers are “forging new paths through a field shaken by the disappearance of traditional models.”
  • Expanding the Circle: The Engaged Photographer
     In this video, Meiselas discusses documentary photography’s potential to connect and move audiences by “expanding the circle of knowledge” about human rights and social justice issues.
  • New York Times, Lens — “Moving Walls and Minds“
  • TIME Magazine, LightBox — “From The Front Lines, Regional Photographers Make All The Difference“
  • TIME Magazine, LightBox  — “A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph From Bangladesh“
  • TIME Magazine, LightBox — “What a Photograph Can Accomplish: Bending the Frame by Fred Ritchin“
  • New York Times, Lens — “Empowering Photographers to Embrace an Uncertain Future“
  • Politico — “The Day We Pretended to Care About the Ukraine“
  • The Guardian Media Blog — “Is it ‘too trivial’ for complex geopolitical stories to use the same techniques as for horses that look like Miley Cyrus?“
  • David Campbell — “Abundant Photography: The Misleading Metaphor of the Image Flood“
  • MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and IDFA’s Documentary Lab — Moments of Innovation
    A website that connects the endeavors of contemporary innovative in storytellers with the conceptual pioneers and technological prototypes that came before them.
    

• Arts and Culture
• Magnum Cultural Foundation
• Open Society Foundations

About the Author

Jessica Clark

Research Consultant

Jessica is a research consultant for Media Impact Funders, and the founder and director of media production/strategy firm Dot Connector Studio. She is also currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project. Previously, she served as the media strategist for AIR’s groundbreaking Localore project, the director of the Future of Public Media project at American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact, and a Knight Media Policy Fellow at D.C.-based think tank the New America Foundation. Over the past decade, she has led research and convenings with high-profile universities and national media networks, including NPR, PBS, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, MIT, and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. She is the co-author of Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media (The New Press, 2010), and a longtime independent journalist.