January 11, 2022 | Noon
How can photography and film be utilized to raise awareness about atrocities? What is the role of the photographer or filmmaker in these situations, and what are their responsibilities to the communities whose stories they’re trying to lift up? Join us for a discussion with a group of photographers and filmmakers to explore their own experiences and the ongoing work of documenting personal histories of atrocities moderated by Julia Dolan, The Minor White Curator of Photography at the Portland Art Museum.
The program is co-sponsored by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Project at Portland State University, the Never Again Coalition, WorldOregon, and OJMCHE.
We are grateful for your participation and encourage you to consider supporting our virtual programs.
Skye Fitzgerald founded Spin Film to bear witness to unfolding crises with the intent to deepen empathy and understanding. He recently completed the Humanitarian Trilogy – three films on global displacement due to war. The first, 50 FEET FROM SYRIA focuses on doctors working on the Syrian border and was voted onto the Oscar shortlist. The second, LIFEBOAT, documents Search and Rescue operations off the coast of Libya and was nominated for an Academy Award and national Emmy award. The third, HUNGER WARD, explores the impact of the war and famine in Yemen on children, families, and healthcare workers and was also nominated for an Academy Award. As a Fulbright Research Scholar Fitzgerald directed the film BOMBHUNTERS and has worked with the Sundance Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the State Department, and Mountainfilm. Fitzgerald is an honorary member of SAMS (Syrian American Medical Society) for his work with Syrian refugees and a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before filmmaking, Fitzgerald cut fire-lines as a Hotshot crew-member on a wild-land fire-fighting crew. He continues to ride his bicycle to ruin and hugs two dogs on a daily basis.
Greg Constantine is an independent documentary photographer, author, and researcher who has dedicated his career to stories and projects that focus on human rights, inequality, identity and the power of the State. He spent eleven years working on the acclaimed project Nowhere People, (2006-2016) which was a global exploration documenting the lives and struggles of individuals and ethnic communities around the world who had had their citizenship denied or stripped from them by governments, mostly because of discrimination and intolerance. He is the author of three books: Kenya’s Nubians: Then & Now (2011), Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya (2012), and Nowhere People (2015). Exhibitions of his work have been held in over 40 cities worldwide. He is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the International State Crime Initiative. In 2016 he earned his PhD from Middlesex University in the UK. Constantine has spent 15 years documenting the ongoing abuses against the Rohingya. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is currently hosting an exhibit he curated, Burma’s Path to Genocide. He is currently working on the project Seven Doors, exploring how governments are increasingly using detention as a significant component of immigration and asylum policy and exposes the impact, trauma and human cost detention has on asylum seekers, refugees, stateless people and migrants around the world.
Roopa Gogineni is a photographer and filmmaker from West Virginia, based in Atlanta and Paris. Over the past ten years her work has focused on historical memory and life amidst conflict in East Africa. She holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, where she researched the construction of media narratives around Somalia. Her most recent short film I am Bisha was featured on The New York Times Op-Docs and earned the Oscar-qualifying Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short. Roopa currently advises a cohort of doctoral students using visual methodology in their study of pastoralism and uncertainty at The Institute of Development Studies. Roopa is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Diversify Photo, Women Photograph, and The Authority Collective. She speaks French, Spanish, and Telugu and gets by in Swahili and Arabic. She has completed first aid and hostile environment training.
John Rudoff is a photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Portland. In recent years he’s covered certain political and social upheavals and crises — refugees fleeing to southern Europe or to Bangladesh; ‘precarious’, frightened, angry workers in France; the hunger for democracy in Hong Kong; violent and authoritarian politics and protests across America, following the words: “Where the majority of people do not want to be, I function as their eye.” As a photojournalist John sheds light on some of the dark places, knowing that when the truth is documented and revealed, “nobody can say they did not know.” He is represented by Sipa-USA.
Julia Dolan has curated, co-curated, or hosted over 40 photography exhibitions since joining the Portland Art Museum in 2010. She is a member of the Museum’s Equity Team, and was a co-founder of the FOCUS group, a North American network of emerging photography curators, historians, and nonprofit professionals. Dr. Dolan’s exhibitions at the Museum include Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal… (with Sara Krajewski, 2019-20), Toughened to Wind and Sun: Women Photographing the Landscape (2019-20), In the Beginning: Minor White’s Oregon Photographs (2017-2018), Representing: Vernacular Photographs of, by, and for African Americans (2017), Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy: Zig Jackson, Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson (with Dr. Deana Dartt, 2016), and Blue Sky: The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40 (2014). She has published essays in multiple publications. Dr. Dolan received a B.F.A. in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an M.A. in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Boston University. She has worked with the photography collections at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.