Two Voices, One Vision: When Writers and Photographers Collaborate

‍Inspired by Leonard Pitts Jr. and Carl Juste’s project which produced the image, “I Am A Man,” that is currently installed as a public artwork on MOCA Plaza, art historian and curator Elizabeth Shannon, PhD., explores a variety of collaborations between photographers and writers. Looking at a wide selection of photographic artworks where image and text combine to create new meanings, she will discuss photobooks including James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal (1964), among others.

Thursday, August 20th, 2020

7–8pm

Elizabeth Shannon, Phd. is a curator, writer and academic based in Miami, Florida. She has worked with the collection at the International Center of Photography in New York and held curatorial positions at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland, Locust Projects and Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, and was a Knight Curatorial Fellow at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. Shannon co-founded and ran SEAM, an organization that produced site specific projects and exhibitions of contemporary art across different venues in Glasgow, Scotland. Educated in the UK, Shannon holds a PhD in the History of Photography from the University of St Andrews and an MA in History of Art and English Literature from the University of Glasgow. She has taught at the University of St Andrews in the UK and the University of Miami, Florida International University and New World School of the Arts in the US. Shannon has edited and written for a number of art journals and exhibition publications.