Dana Lixenberg, Toussaint, 1993; from the series Imperial Courts, 1993–2015

APERTURE / PARSONS TALK

In Conversation: Dana Lixenberg and George Pitts

Tuesday, October 13, 6:30pm
Aperture Foundation — 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY
New School Event | Facebook Event

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, is pleased to present photographer Dana Lixenberg in conversation with George Pitts. Utilizing a large, analogue view camera, Lixenberg pursues long-term personal projects with a primary focus on individuals and communities on the margins of society. This includes her series Jeffersonville, Indiana, a collection of landscapes and portraits of the small town’s homeless population, and The Last Days of Shishmaref, which documents an Inupiat community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska. Her newest publication, Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 (2015), is a project that explores a public housing project in Watts, Los Angeles, and spans over twenty years. Speaking of Lixenberg’s commitment to the community and her subjects, Pitts writes in an essay that she “establishes a thematic continuity pertaining to the vestiges of time, and the degrees of change that can be recorded by the camera . . . we notice shifts in how the sitters perceive themselves, which suggest the larger changes that occur in their lives.”

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Charina Endowment Fund, William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Inc., and the Board of Trustees and Members of Aperture Foundation.

Dana Lixenberg (born in Amsterdam, 1964) divides her time between New York and Amsterdam. She studied photography at the London College of Printing (1984–86) and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1987–89). Her work is part of many corporate and private collections. She has exhibited extensively, and her work has appeared in publications such as Vibe, the New Yorker, and Time. Her books include united states (2001), Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), Set Amsterdam (2011), De Burgemeester/The Mayor (2011), and Imperial Courts (2015).

George Pitts is a photographer, painter, and writer, and an assistant professor in the photography program at Parsons The New School for Design, in the School of Art, Media, and Technology. Pitts was director of photography at Life magazine from 2004 to 2007; from 1993 to 2004, he had been the founding director of photography at Vibe magazine. In 2006, he received the Lucie Award for Picture Editor of the Year. His photography has been published in the New York Times Magazine, New York, Paper, Esquire, and others. His writing has been published in The PhotoBook Review, Hotshoe, the Paris Review, Vibe, Juxtapoz, Camera Obscura, Parenthesis, and other publications. He wrote the critical essay for Dana Lixenberg’s monograph united states (2001).