INsight Artists
The Paramount Theater marquis at LOOK3 2011. Image by Kate Napier.
Inside the Paramount Theater before an INsight Conversation. Image by Meredith Montague.
Antonin Kratochvil (center) on-stage for his INsight Conversation with Master of Ceremonies Vincent J. Musi (left) and 2011 Guest Curator Scott Thode (right). Image by Michael Nichols.
Massimo Vitali on-stage during his INsight interview with Alex Chadwick. Image by Michael Nichols.
2011 Guest Curator and Director of Photography for the New York Times Magazine Kathy Ryan selected Sally Mann (left), a renowned photographer and 2007 INsight artist, as the interviewer for Nan Goldin's INsight conversation. The result was an intimate and unbridled discussion on how these two female artists live and work. Image by Michael Nichols.
The entrance to Antonin Kratochvil's INsight exhibit at LOOK3 2011.
Gilles Peress's 2009 Insight exhibit Natures Mortes. Image by Terri Smith.
Sylvia Plachy's 2009 INsight exhibit held at the McGuffey Art Center. Image by Will May.
Interviewer John Gossage (right) views Martin Parr's 2009 INsight exhibit held at Second Street Gallery in downtown Charlottesville. Image by John Mitchell.
Massimo Vitali signs books in his gallery after his INsight conversation. Image by Michael Nichols.
About INsight Artists
At the core of LOOK3′s programming are the INsight Conversations held in the historic Paramount Theater. With the purpose of celebrating and honoring the careers of the most influential living photographers of our time, this three-night event offers audiences the rare opportunity to listen and learn from the artists who have helped define the art of picture-making. Large-scale projections of the artist’s work accompany these on-stage, one-on-one conversations between the artist and interviewer. Each INsight Artist also exhibits a special solo gallery-show at one of Charlottesville’s downtown art galleries.
Nan Goldin – 2011
“For me taking a picture is a way of touching somebody-it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on-I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.” – Nan Goldin
“Nan Goldin takes unforgettable photographs. They make a point, a liberating point… about sensuality, about candor, about affection. They combat moralistic bullshit. I admire her spirit and I admire her art.” – Susan Sontag
NAN GOLDIN received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, in 1977. In 1978 she moved to New York where she continued to document her “extended family.” These photographs became the subject of her slideshows and Goldinʼs first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her film, Sisters, Saints, & Sibyls, pays homage to her sister Barbara, whose rebellion and suicide have so deeply marked her life and work. In 2006, Goldin was awarded the prestigious Commandeur de L’Order des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in recognition for her significant contribution to the arts. She has exhibited at such prestigious venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Currently she works and lives both in Paris and New York.
www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin
Antonin Kratochvil – 2011
“Photography for me is a way of getting my own pain out. It is pointing a finger and accusing.” – Antonin Kratochvil
“Antonin Kratochvil is a photographer with a deep and soulful commitment to the humanist vision in photography. His photographs draw deeply on his own extraordinary journey and refugee experience. He has a remarkable way of sharing this voice through the light and shadows that drive his astonishing compositions and his visual storytelling.” – Ken Light
ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL is one of the founders of VII photo agency. As a photojournalist Kratochvil has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes while passionately pursuing his documentation of the time in which he lives. Kratochvilʼs own refugee life has often mirrored what he has rendered on film. Kratochvil has received numerous awards including the three First Prize World Press Photo Awards, Medal from the City of Prague for Photography awarded by the Mayor of Prague, Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Eyewitness Essay for Life Magazine, A Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Photojournalism and numerous others. In addition, Kratochvil has published many books including Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe; Vanishing, a collection of natural and human phenomena that are on the verge of extinction; and Afterlife, the story of an old woman who refuses to leave her farm in the exclusion zone in Chernobyl.
www.antoninkratochvil.com
Massimo Vitali – 2011
“I follow stories. I look at people, people that interest me…and I start to make connections. When I see a certain number of these connections taking place, then I shoot. I try to have the picture as complicated as I possibly can.” – Massimo Vitali
“I’m convinced that if I look hard enough, I can see everything and forever … Somehow Massimo wields his looking-glass magic, where the otherworldly light and the strange landscapes and patterns and the depth of field work to pull you right in.” – Dean Robinson, The New York Times
MASSIMO VITALI was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. He moved to London after high school, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing. In the early sixties, Vitali started working as a photojournalist, collaborating with many magazines and agencies in Italy and Europe. It was during this time that he met the founder of the agency Report, Simon Guttman, who was to become fundamental in Massimo’s growth as a “concerned photographer.” Vitali’s beach panoramas began in light of drastic political changes in Italy, during which time he began to look at his fellow countrymen very carefully. He lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.
www.massimovitali.com
Sylvia Plachy – 2009
“In a Photograph, you cannot peel back the shades of gray; below the emulsion is whiteness: the alchemy is in the coating.” – Sylvia Plachy
“She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.” – Richard Avedon
SYLVIA PLACHY immigrated to the United States from Hungary with her parents in 1958, and started photographing in 1964. Her evocative photography is acclaimed as diverse, surprising, and humorous, transforming the elusive into the poetic. Although perhaps best known for pictures in the Village Voice, her work has appeared in over fifty major publications. Her books include Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, which won a Golden Light Award; Signs and Relics; Red Light, a groundbreaking work on the sex industry; and Unguided Tour, for which she won an ICP Infinity Award. Andre Kertesz, her mentor and compatriot, said of her work, “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity.” Sylvia Plachy has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a CAPS Grant. She has exhibited internationally and her work is in multiple collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. www.sylviaplachy.com
Martin Parr – 2009
“With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.” – Martin Parr
“He is a cunning photographer, sidling his way into situations where he shouldn’t always be, looking as ordinary as the people he photographs.” – Val Williams
MARTIN PARR is arguably Britain’s most important contemporary photographer, with a unique perspective and unmistakable style, and a critical and popular following in the worlds of art, fashion and journalism. Inspired by his grandfather, Parr studied photography from 1970 to 1973, taking on various teaching assignments through the early 1990s. Switching to color in the early 1980s, he documented the English working class during the era of Thatcher, earning an international reputation for his innovative imagery. “I suppose I started to make a critique of society as it is, rather than a celebration of what it used to be.” For Parr, the moral atrophy and preposterousness of our daily lives means we can only find salvation through adopting a certain sense of humor. As an insightful commentator on commercial culture and social life, he has revitalized and repositioned contemporary documentary photography. A member of Magnum since 1994, Parr has published over twenty books and been widely exhibited around the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tokyo, the Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. www.martinparr.com
Gilles Peress – 2009
“Is a picture worth a thousand words? It depends on the picture. These photographs are so overwhelming that words, any words, seem trite.” – Raul Nino
GILLES PERESS is an internationally renowned photographer. Having studied political science and philosophy in Paris, he began working with photography in 1970. He has documented events in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Bosnia, Rwanda, New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Peress often represents the complexity of conflict in his acclaimed books by using minimal text, juxtaposing mundane detail with unfolding catastrophe. For him, there is never a clear distinction between war and peace; in his words, “War is never total war; in the same way, peace is never total peace.” Currently Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College, NY, and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley, Peress continues to develop his ongoing project titled “Hate Thy Brother,” a cycle of documentary narratives that looks at intolerance and its consequences. A member of Magnum since 1972, his work is exhibited and collected internationally by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, Museum Folkwang, and Sprengel Museum Hannover. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple NEA grants, the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, multiple ICP Infinity Awards, and the Pollock-Krasner grant. www.magnumphotos.com/GillesPeress
Mary Ellen Mark – 2008
“There’s nothing much interesting to tell about me; what’s interesting is the person I’m photographing, and that’s what I try to show. … I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.” – Mary Ellen Mark
“Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs reveal her ability to convey with powerful insight the drama, the magic, and the tragedy of her subject’s lives.” – Anne Havinga, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
MARY ELLEN MARK began photographing with a Brownie camera at age nine. In 1963 she was awarded a scholarship to the Annenberg School. From the moment she picked up an old Retina camera for her first school assignment, she was hooked: “I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be for the rest of my life.” Mark’s images of our world’s diverse cultures are landmarks in the field of documentary photography, exhibited worldwide and published in over sixteen books. As in the Academy Award-nominated film Streetwise, Mary Ellen has collaborated on her most recent book and exhibition project with her husband, Martin Bell. Mary Ellen’s numerous awards include the ICP Cornell Capa Award, three NEA grants, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Infinity Award for Journalism, five honorary doctorates, and a Walter Annenberg Grant for her book and exhibition project on America. www.maryellenmark.com
Joel-Peter Witkin – 2008
“History shows that only the artists who worked outside the parameters of established art have made and will always make contributions to history.” – Joel-Peter Witkin
“Joel-Peter Witkin knows that, contrary to popular wisdom, we are not rational creatures, but subject to our senses. He uses sight, our most privileged sense, to unnerve and instruct us. Witkin’s images do not merely shock, they enlighten, if only by forcing us to embrace what we’d rather leave unexamined.” – Catherine Edelman Gallery
JOEL-PETER WITKIN began making photographs at the age of sixteen with a twin-lens reflex camera. While serving in the Army from 1961-64, he photographed accidents, maneuvers, and suicides. He later received a BFA in sculpture from Cooper Union and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. With his unique vision, Witkin fashions works that “confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity.” Among his awards are two Ford Foundation and four NEA grants, the ICP Award for Visual Arts, and the Commandeur de L’Order des Artes et des Lettres. His work is collected by institutions including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Stedelijk Museum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.edelmangallery.com/witkin
James Nachtwey – 2008
“I am a witness and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent and do justice to the people I’m photographing.” – James Nachtwey
“Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents.” – Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times
JAMES NACHTWEY decided to teach himself photography upon seeing images from Vietnam and the civil rights movement. After graduating from Dartmouth, he worked as a truck driver and on merchant ships, acquiring skills that would prove useful in his chosen occupation. He worked as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico and moved to New York in 1980. He has been a contract photographer with Time magazine since 1984, was a member of Magnum from 1986–2001, and is one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. David Reiff of the L.A. Times called his book Inferno “not just a moral triumph but an aesthetic one.” In 2007, Nachtwey was one of three winners of the TED Prize, an award “dedicated to ideas worth spreading.” Nachtwey’s work has been exhibited internationally, and he has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times), the ICP Infinity Award (three times), and the Martin Luther King Award. www.jamesnachtwey.com
William Albert Allard – 2007
“I think I can feel color. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it. In my photography, color and
composition are inseparable. I see in color.” – William Albert Allard
“Call Allard’s photographs wonderful performances. They gain in our esteem – given their particularity, their luminance, the high finish they give to human existance – if we think of them not as facts but as art, made things, opinions, as brightly informative and indispensable mediators between the world and we who would see it, like it, live in it more fully.” – Richard Ford, Portraits of America.
William Albert Allard’s subjects address the camera with surprising openness in photographs that have been a staple of National Geographic Magazine, where he has produced over thirty articles since 1964. Equal parts colorist, storyteller, and ethnographer, his down-to-earth manner, fierce integrity, and the consistent brilliance of his essays have made him a romantic model for a generation of American photographers. Allard has published five highly acclaimed books. Vanishing Breed, a collection of photographs and writings about cowboys and the West was nominated for The American Book Award and received the Leica Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Achievement. Allard’s prints appear in many private and museum collections and have been published in most major U.S. and European publications. He has photographed in twenty-five countries on topics as diverse as rodeos, urban elephants, and India’s untouchables. www.williamalbertallard.com
Sally Mann – 2007
“I want my work to be about the people and places that I love, in all their complexity…and the hope is that it will have a universal resonance in spite of being so personal. To that end, I’m not afraid to use lyricism, romance and intimacy which, like venom to the snake-handlers, offer terrible risk but also a ticket to transcendence.” – Sally Mann
“Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann’s steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise – subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.” – Reynolds Price, Time
One of America’s most renowned photographers, Sally Mann has exhibited work around the world and was designated “America’s Best Photographer” in 2001 by Time magazine. Mann has won numerous awards, including three NEA Fellowships, the Century Award from the Museum of Photographic Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is housed in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In 2002, two documentaries about her work aired on PBS. A feature length film, What Remains, debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. She has published seven monographs, among them Immediate Family, a series of startlingly intimate images of her three children, and Deep South, a compilation of her haunting and otherworldly landscape imagery. Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia, where she was born in 1951. www.sallymann.com
Eugene Richards – 2007
“There are ninety-one boxes of photographs up there on the floor to ceiling shelves: photographs that have me wanting to return places; photographs that might make some people uncomfortable.” – Eugene Richards
“The obvious trust that [his] subjects place in him explains in part his ability to view their lives from the inside – from their beds and bathrooms, as though he were a guest at the kitchen table or a member of the family.” – Richard Woodward, New York Times Magazine
Eugene Richards, one of photography’s most single-minded social documentarian, aims for immediate, intimate, unflinching access to victimized individuals. Richards is best known for his books – he has authored thirteen – and photo essays on such diverse topics as breast cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, pediatric HIV and AIDS, the meat packing industry, the plight of the world’s mentally disabled, and aging and death in America. Among numerous honors, he has won the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three NEA grants, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Olivier Rebbot Award (twice), and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged. www.eugenerichards.com
