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Vail cancels residency program for Native American artist

By in Native

Vail cancels residency program for Native American artist
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In early March, Indigenous artist Danielle SeeWalker posted a new painting to her Instagram: A woman in profile, her face grayed out except one eye staring directly at the viewer — a signature of SeeWalker’s painted works. The woman is wearing a keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf worn to signal support of Palestine, with a feather by her ear and a bright red braid.

Reactions to the painting were overwhelmingly positive, “I’m so grateful to know you and your work,” one person wrote. Hands clapping and watermelon emojis, a symbol of Palestinian support, dotted the comment section. She later created 60 prints of the painting, titled “G is for Genocide,” and sold them to raise money for the UN Crisis Relief Fund.

But in early May, that same painting stripped her opportunity to spend part of her summer as Vail’s artist in residence.

Vail has been inching toward an artist in residence program for over two decades, and finally took a major stride last year bringing Washington-based artist Squire Broel to the town for a pilot program. In January, the town contacted SeeWalker, a Denver-based Lakota artist whose work across mediums reflects her experiences as an Indigenous woman in contemporary America. They wanted her as their second artist in residence.

“They had a robust program with a stipend, studio, community engagement opportunities,” SeeWalker said. “I was really excited about it. I was really excited, as a person of color, to bring my art to a place that is … ” she paused. “Not really known for its diversity.”

And Vail was excited too. “We had a sincere interest in her art and her passion around Native Americans,” Vail town manager Russell Forrest said Thursday in an interview. In February, SeeWalker opened an exhibition with History Colorado that pairs historic Native American artifacts with contemporary artworks.

SeeWalker worked with Vail’s Art in Public Places program to develop a residency that would include a mural at the Vail Village parking structure, a photography exhibit from her Red Road Project and a moderated discussion at the Vail Symposium, a nonprofit independent of the town that provides educational programming.

The city posted an announcement about her residency on May 6, one month before she was scheduled to move in. Then the town started to receive emails.

“We started getting messages from individuals looking closely at her social media posts,” Forrest said. “The concern was around the very polarizing issue in Israel and Gaza right now. We didn’t want public funds connected to a project about a polarizing geopolitical issue that is still playing out.”’

Discourse around Palestine since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has become increasingly fraught. Political conflict has erupted in the statehouse, city council chambers and college campuses.

SeeWalker hadn’t submitted a proposal for her project. The town had no way of knowing what the mural would be. But Art in Public Places wasn’t willing to wait and see.

“The messaging had already occurred. The post and the reaction had occurred,” Forrest said.

Three days after the news release hit the town’s website, it was removed and replaced with a statement, emphasizing the fact that her art had turned from focusing on Native Americans to the crisis in Gaza.

“I tried to explain my position, tried to understand more about the community’s concerns, but they just talked over me and ended the call,” SeeWalker said. The call lasted “a minute and a half, tops. And that was probably the most disappointing part of the whole thing,” she said. “The disrespect.”

SeeWalker said she painted “G is for Genocide” in recognition of the parallels between the plight of Native Americans in the U.S. and the crisis in Gaza.

“It’s about erasing a culture, about taking land. Me as an Indigenous person, this is what happened to my ancestors,” SeeWalker said. “The piece is not about taking sides, it’s about humanity, it’s about not destroying a culture and letting people live.”

But she never had a chance to explain that, nor will she. The whole experience has soured her to the residency in Vail. “I was just blindsided. No chance to understand or explain. After that, even if they wanted to offer me a residency, I wouldn’t take it.”

The big picture: Huck Finn in 1970s New Jersey

By in Photography

The big picture: Huck Finn in 1970s New Jersey
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Ming Smith photographed the four boys on their backdoor rafts on a pond in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1972. She called the unlikely urban Huck Finn scene Setting Out to Sea, since that’s where one or two of the friends seemed to be aiming for, at least in their heads.

Smith was developing big plans of her own at that time. Detroit-born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, she had arrived in New York a year earlier after graduating from Howard University. Her first published pictures appeared in the inaugural, renowned Black Photographers Annual in 1973. The annual, with an introduction by Toni Morrison, featured the work of artists from the Kamoinge Workshop in Harlem, which was a prime mover in the Black Arts movement. Smith had become the first female member of that group. Her biography in the annual read: “New York amateur photographer Ming Smith has been taking pictures for less than a year. She is a self-taught photographer, who was first influenced by her father. ‘My photographs,’ she says, ‘attempt to open the passageway to my understanding of myself.’”

Part of that understanding came from wandering the Lower West Side neighbourhood in which she lived, “following the light”, as she describes it, looking for the places, as here, in which it collected and came alive. Her biography wasn’t quite accurate; she had been taking pictures with her dad since she was a girl; at Howard she photographed a young Cassius Clay and went on to take celebrated portraits of everyone from her friend Grace Jones to James Baldwin and Nina Simone. In 1979, she was the first Black female photographer to have work bought by the Museum of Modern Art (an accolade she likened to “winning an Oscar and no one knowing”). This picture is included in a retrospective of Smith’s work, On the Road, at the Nicola Vasell gallery in New York.

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BEST LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHER: Benson-Jaja, better known as Somi 2024

By in Photography

BEST LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHER: Benson-Jaja, better known as Somi 2024

Sometimes, the stories that define us take time to unfold.

Someari Benson-Jaja knows that all too well.

Benson-Jaja grew up with a camera in his hand, yet never thought he’d become a professional photographer.

Even with a nickname like Kodak. Even with his portfolio of family photos. Even with multiyear stints taking pictures, shooting videos and producing media shows while a student at then-Armstrong Atlantic State University (now Georgia Southern University).

Instead, Benson-Jaja, better known as Somi, majored in music education, became an elementary-school music teacher and kept photography as a hobby.

“I always had a camera in my hand and was always playing with a camera, but it was never with the intention of becoming a photographer,” Somi said.

All that changed at the urging of his former Armstrong classmates, who pushed Somi to make his childhood passion his adult profession.

“They would call and say, ‘Do you still have a camera, because I need some photos of this or that,’” Somi recounted. “So they were the ones that actually kind of pushed me into photography more than myself making a calculated movement into the area. Those people saw that talent in me before I saw it in myself.”

Now, everyone’s seeing it, including Somi. Not for the first time, he has been recognized for his artistic eye and the quality of the images he creates.

“Photography was my hobby then my side hustle,” he said. “And then it slowly became the main hustle.”

Today, Somi is the president and founder of Shot by Somi, which started life as a hashtag, blossomed into a brand and later became a business.

Ask Somi about his passion for pictures and he gets a far-away look. For him, photography makes the impermanent permanent, freezes not just the moment but the feelings that surrounded it. Eliminates barriers and builds bridges. Ultimately, a picture is never just a captured image. It’s so much more.

“I think sometimes images, without us knowing, strengthen us or strengthen our awareness in who we are and our self-worth,” he said. “You look back on those pictures of when you were a child and with your family, and they remind you of nostalgic good times. Or you might look back on your senior yearbook and the pictures with your friends, and it reminds you of the experiences that got you to where you are, and they become an imprint. I think that’s one of the most amazing things about photography.”

Somi’s own childhood started in Kentucky, where he lived until the third grade when he moved to Savannah at the behest of his minister father. He was reluctant to move, he said, because he’d heard about the hurricanes that sometimes struck the coastal city. He wanted no part of that.

Now, he’s embraced Savannah and everything that comes with it. Working hard to give back to a community that has given him so much, Somi serves as the president of Buy Local Savannah and is on the board of the United Way of the Coastal Empire and the Emmaus House. After making the difficult decision to leave teaching, he knew he’d pursue a life of public service to balance his entrepreneurial interests.

From his studio off Chatham Parkway, Somi shoots a broad range of subjects from people to products. Ultimately, though, it’s people — and the happiness they hold — that he enjoys capturing the most.

“A lot of times when you’re taking portraits or shooting an event, people are happy and, for the most part, they’re smiling,” Somi said. “There’s something appealing about seeing adults smile. We don’t see adults smile all the time. I think that happiness that comes from being able to take people at their best moments and capture them to where they can hold onto this one image that lasts a lot longer than the time it was taken is one of the most appealing things about photography.”

Limited Amount of Event Tickets Available for the Best of Savannah Awards: https://events.connectsavannah.com/event/best-of-savannah-2024/

Byron photographer captures striking image of major solar storm

By in Photography

Byron photographer captures striking image of major solar storm
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BYRON — Late Friday night the advance waves of a monster solar storm crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The event was categorized by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as an “extreme” G5 geomagnetic storm that followed days of heightened amounts of solar activitiy that saw numerous magnetic eruptions on the sun’s surface.

Exhibit of war photographs by Anja Niedringhaus pays tribute to her spirit, courage of journalists

By in Photography

Exhibit of war photographs by Anja Niedringhaus pays tribute to her spirit, courage of journalists
Saturday, May 11, 2024

Kathy Gannon shares an iconic photo by Anja Niedringhaus during a talk at Emerson College in Boston in 2022. (Photo: Beena Sarwar)

An exhibition of powerful images from Afghanistan and Pakistan by the late Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus opened Thursday in Cambridge and is up through June 2.

I never met Niedringhaus, a German who worked in my country, Pakistan, but I have long known her close friend and colleague Kathy Gannon, a Canadian who has lived in Islamabad for decades. Gannon was severely injured in the attack that killed Niedringhaus.

An Afghan police commander had emptied the magazine of his AK-47 into the back seat of the Toyota Corolla where Gannon and Niedringhaus sat waiting outside a government compound in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost to cover the presidential election for The Associated Press.

Niedringhaus died instantly. She was 48. Seven bullets shattered Gannon’s arms and shoulders. One of her arms was shot practically off; a lung was punctured and collapsed.

Gannon is now the driving force behind the exhibition, which premiered at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York on April 4, marking 10 years to the day that Niedringhaus was shot and killed. There, I also met Niedringhaus’s older sister Elke Niedringhaus-Haasper, a journalist in Germany, who flew back for the reception at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation and the Shorenstein Center.

Courage

The opening reception at the Bronx was followed by the International Women’s Media Foundation Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award ceremony, now in its 10th year.

Gannon and Niedringhaus are International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism awardees – Niedringhaus in 2005 and Gannon in 2002. Gannon is also a Spring 2022 Shorenstein Center fellow.

The IWMF established the Courage in Photojournalism Award award after Niedringhaus’s death with a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to celebrate “courageous women photojournalists” and recognize the “importance of visual journalism that helps us better understand our complicated world.”

This year’s awardees were Samar Abu Elouf from Palestine, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a 2016 Nieman fellow from the U.K. and Sweden, and Nariman El Mofty from Egypt and Canada. Anastasia was the only one of the three able to attend the ceremony.

Gannon and Niedringhaus had planned to do a text and photo book on Afghanistan that they wanted to publish by the end of 2014, around the time the United States was to hand over security to the Afghans. Niedringhaus had already begun choosing images. “And it is that book that we changed to be just Niedringhaus and her images with remembrances, which is accompanying the exhibition,” said Gannon, 70, who retired from the AP in 2022 after 35 years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan and became the driving force behind the exhibition and book, which is supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the AP.

She has undergone 18 surgeries since the attack, with an annual procedure in New York. The last one was some days after the Bronx exhibition launch.

In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never once heard Gannon complain or mention her injuries or trauma. Even now, when I reach out to ask her about the exhibit, she is characteristically matter-of-fact and focuses more on Niedringhaus and her spirit – which she herself exemplifies.

“Your life is as important to me as it is to you,” she remembers the Afghan surgeon saying at the government hospital in Khost.

He cauterized the bleeding, put a tube in her punctured lung so she could breathe and “literally used duct tape and wood to put my arm together,” says Gannon.

Doctors at the French military hospital in Kabul where she was later medically evacuated said that had she reached them first, they would have amputated the arm.

The pain is pretty steady, she admits when I ask, but “you manage it. When you think about what could have happened, it was so close to the spine … I’m so grateful every day.”

She continued reporting tenaciously, going back to Afghanistan like a rider thrown from a horse who gets back up.

Gannon has been in the region since 1986, when the mujahideen, so-called “holy warriors” trained and conditioned in Pakistan, financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, were fighting the Soviet Union. They later morphed into the Taliban (literally, “students” – of the seminaries they had been trained at in Pakistan).

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Gannon was one of the few Western reporters they permitted to work there, a testament to the fairness of her reporting and the trust she inspires.

Humanity

The exhibition and the photographs themselves are a testament to the creed followed by both women, to humanize people and present them to the world in all their complexities, beyond the stereotypes.

Gannon’s co-authors and co-curators for the book and the exhibition are Ann Marie “Ami” Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation, also a close friend of Niedringhaus who edited her “At War” book, and Muhammad Muheisen, two-time Pulitzer-winning photographer who runs the Every Day Refugees foundation and photographs for National Geographic.

Niedringhaus traveled for her work “through some of the most difficult years of the protracted Afghan war, reaching deep into the soul of Afghans, her pictures often serving to remind us of our own humanity,” says the Bronx Documentary Center, founded and run by the journalist Michael Kamber.

When Gannon began reaching out to possible partners for the exhibition, Michael was the first to say yes. She realized quickly that he is someone “Anja would be one with.” With his commitment to the community he serves – largely Haitian immigrants – he exemplifies “her spirit of giving, caring … she was a crazy person for helping others.”

She was with Niedringhaus on those trips “reaching deep into the soul of Afghans” – and Pakistanis – documenting in words what Niedringhaus did in pictures, offering glimpses into lives rarely witnessed by outsiders.

They are the only Western journalists to embed with Pakistan’s army, as well as the Afghan army, experiences they shared in a detailed interview with IWMF in 2012.

Another uniquely daring embed was with truckers from Landikotal in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa transporting fuel from Karachi to Kandahar.

“We did a lot of stories like that which no one had ever done before or since,” Gannon told me. “We were trying to make the invisible visible.”

She shared some of these stories and photos with my journalism students and at a larger discussion with two more classes at Emerson College in the fall of 2022. I had roped her in, as she was in the Boston area as a Shorenstein fellow.

“The exhibition serves to remind us of the extraordinary sacrifices journalists make to keep us all informed. This is a particularly powerful lesson at a time when journalists are dying, suffering life-changing injuries, being targeted, or being imprisoned at an alarming rate,” Kamber said.

  • “Anja Niedringhaus,” the war photography exhibit, is up through June 2 at the Center for Government and International Studies in the Knafel Concourse, 1737 Cambridge St., Mid-Cambridge near Harvard Square.

Beena Sarwar is founder and chief editor of Sapan News, where Kathy Gannon serves on the informal advisory council. This article has not been sponsored or commissioned by anyone. An earlier version of this piece was published by Sapan News. This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for use with due credit to sapannews.com.

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