Panelists:
Jonathan Torgovnik – artist/ photographer
Heather McClintock – artist/ photographer 
Heather Dwyer – Blue Earth Alliance
Melissa Harris – Aperture Foundation
Tom Rankin – Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
Mark Sloan, Moderator

The Halsey Institute has put together a symposium with intent to discuss the dissemination of difficult imagery. The panel will explore different exhibition venues, websites, and publishers’ perspectives. Each panelist will give a brief (20 min.) overview concerning their organization’s engagement with challenging work, and share a few stories about how the organization has been able to persevere in this rarefied area.

Jonathan Torgovnik
Jonathan Torgovnik was born in 1969 in Israel and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday TimesMagazine,and Stern, among others. He has been a contract photographer for Newsweekmagazine since 2005, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from Intended Consequences. Torgovnik’s award-winning photographs have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe and are in the permanent collections of museums such as The Museums of Fine Arts, Houston and the Bibliotheque National De France in Paris. He is the author of Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press), an exploration of the motion picture industry and its culture in India. He is also co-founder of Foundation Rwanda, a non-profit organization that supports secondary school education for children born of rape in Rwanda.
website »

Heather McClintock
Originally from Vermont, Heather McClintock was seeking a deeper, more intimate connection to humanity and the commonalities of our existence. Beginning in the fall of 2005, McClintock lived in northern Uganda for just under a year, initially pursuing a desire to focus on humanitarian relief work through a photography program run out of Kampala. She started documenting the struggles of the Acholi tribe of Northern Uganda in 2006. Heather states that her images only touch on the Acholi’s unimaginable suffering and it is her hope that the photographs will underscore this complicated and imperfect life we all share. She hopes the viewers will lend compassion to all brave survivors of conflict. Her Uganda portfolio has garnered several awards and recognitions, including most recently being selected for the prestigious Eddie Adam’s Barnstorm XXI Workshop. She was also awarded an artist’s sponsorship by Blue Earth Alliance for The Innocent: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda project, Merit of Excellence and Honorable Mention in the 2007 International Color Awards Photography Master’s Cup, the 2006 Center for Photographic Art Artist Project Award, the 2008 and 2006 Photo Review International, and First Prize and Honorable Mention in photojournalism in the Black & White Spider Awards. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and several private collections. 
website »

Heather Dwyer
Blue Earth Alliance »
Heather Dwyer is an arts advocate, administrator and accidental curator. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Blue Earth Alliance, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about endangered cultures, threatened environments and social concerns through photography. Heather has worked for not-for-profit organizations, corporations and government agencies in the Pacific Northwest for the past twenty years. She is currently a Program Coordinator at 4Culture, the cultural services provider for King County in Washington State. Other past experience includes: President, Washington Lawyers for the Arts; Arts Manager of Jack Straw Productions; Program Director of Artist Trust, Assistant Director of Bank of America Art Programs NW; and Program Assistant of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. She serves as an arts adviser to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, University of Washington Extension Program and Richard Hugo House. She holds a B.F.A. from Cornish College of the Arts and a M.F.A. from California Institute of Arts (CalArts). 

Melissa Harris
Aperture Foundation »
Melissa Harris is Editor-in-Chief of Aperture magazine and editor/curator on selected projects for the foundation. She teaches at NYU in the Photo and Imaging department at Tisch and at Columbia Journalism School.

Tom Rankin
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University »
Tom Rankin is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies and Associate Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University.  A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Rankin is formerly Associate Professor of Art and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and Chair of the Art Department at Delta State University.  He is a graduate of Tufts University (BA, summa cum laude, American History), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MA, Folklore), and Georgia State University (MFA, Photography). A native of Kentucky, his books include Sacred Space:  Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre:  Photographs of a River Life  (1995);Faulkner’s World:  The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).  He is the co-director and co-producer of the documentary filmPowerhouse for God.  His photographs have been collected and published, and included in numerous exhibitions.  He is a frequent writer and lecturer on southern art, culture, and the documentary tradition. 

Moderated by Mark Sloan, Director and Senior Curator of the Halsey Institute