© Marc Garanger
May in New York means the New York Photo Festival, which opens this Thursday. Last year I missed the festival because I was traveling, but this time around I plan to get myself to many of the events. There are some great artists talks scheduled including: Deborah Willis and Jessica Ingram, Zed Nelson, Eirik Johnson and Jason Houston, and Marc Garanger. As an army photographer in the 1960s, Garanger was forced to photograph Algerian women against their will for identity cards issued by the French government. Many of the women in the photographs had never shown their faces in public before standing in front of Garanger's camera.
Garanger returned to Algeria in 2002 to foster a discussion within the same communities around these photographs. The images are haunting and raise questions the relationship of colonialism and the photographic document.
Here's the full schedule for the New York Photo Festival.
© Joshua Lutz
On Tuesday, before all of this gets underway, NY Perspectives, featuring the work of Joshua Lutz, Gus Powell and Carl Wooley, opens at 25 Central Park West. The show features work they made in 2009 through a commission by the City of Amsterdam Archives and Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. I'm not sure what 25CPW is, but it sounds nice. Like the kind of place with hors d'oeuvres and wine in real glasses.
