St. Lawrence University: Festival of the Arts

Friday, February 23, 3:00 p.m. Griffiths 123

Photographing Culture
Slide lecture and discussion with Alison Wright

True ethnographic photographers strive to document the evidence of cultural change and avoid romantic idealism. I find that from years of photographing cultures, I have collected data in my images, even if only subconsciously. For instance, while in the Arctic last fall, I was invited to attend an outdoor community feast. My photographs portray women cutting seal and caribou meat with traditional ulu knives, and the group eating raw meat and preparing stews and hot tea. Yet in the background are the SUVs and pick-up trucks in which we all had arrived. It would be misleading to the viewer to portray contemporary Inuit living in igloos, riding dog sleds, and wearing only fur, and as a photographer, I question how my choices affect the portrayal of culture. These are some of the issues I will discuss in my lecture. - AW

Baffin Island, Pangnirtung, preparing caribou and seal for local feast, 2000
Color photograph

Alison Wright, a freelance photojournalist based in San Francisco, documents the traditions and challenges of endangered cultures in remote areas around the world. She is the photographer and author of Spirit of Tibet: Portrait of a Culture in Exile, published by Snow Lion Publications in 1998. Her work includes photographic essays on medicinal healers in the Amazon rainforests, the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Burmese refugees in Thailand, and Marco Polo's footsteps across the Silk Road of China and Pakistan, as well as life in the outback of Australia, where she lived for two years. Based in Nepal for four years while documenting the plight of children for UNICEF and other aid organizations, Wright received the Dorothea Lange Award in 1993 for her photographs of child labor in Asia. Since then, she has lived with exiled Tibetans in Nepal and India for over a decade, recording their culture and the challenges which exile has brought. In the summer of 2000, her photographs were featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as part of their Folklife Festival on Tibetan culture.