Throughout the month of April, we were busy getting ready for lots of exciting Initiative-related events. Take a look below and see what strikes your fancy. We hope that you can join us!

#NOWSEETHIS party, May 9

Last call for party tickets! It’s now or never, folks. #NOWSEETHIS, co-presented by CMOA and VIA, is going to be an amazing night of new music and never-before-seen new media art. And when I say new media, I mean it. Ever heard of augmented reality tattoos? Or a Crash Kiss photobooth? How about custom-created video projections by Pussykrew, the international duo most recently installed as artists-in-residence at CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry? See them all at the museum, one night only, on May 9. While you’re there, you’ll probably also be interested in the amazing slate of featured music performers, beginning with Juliana Huxtable—one of the stars of The New Museum’s Triennial—to be followed by the amazing one-man-show known as Dinner, and headlined by the fabulous Kelela. Don’t forget your party shoes!

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Sara Cwynar, Girl from Contact Sheet 2 (Darkroom Manuals), 2013. Courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York.

If I had to choose one image to encapsulate the visual and verbal conversations that have embodied the Initiative over the past two years, I’d probably put Sara Cwynar’s Girl from Contact Sheet 2 (Darkroom Manuals) among the top five. Okay, maybe more like the top three. It’s not just because of the tension-cum-synergy between digital and analog that the picture so powerfully and poetically conveys (and that Oliver Wasow finds so evocative in his commissioned response this month). It’s because the image represents a growing shift in the medium “from taking pictures to making pictures,” as recently described by the publisher of FlakPhoto, Andy Adams. This making consists of everything from appropriating vernacular photographs to digital wizardry with the tools of Photoshop to physical layering made up of any and all media available to an artist.

The successful admixture of these elements depends, of course, on an audience savvy enough to understand the constituent parts and interpret what their juxtaposition might mean or say. An audience that gets the way in which contemporary photographic practice is no longer (or perhaps has never been) about either-or, but rather both-and. An audience that traffics regularly and with ease in the increasingly universal language of images.

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Inside the ATLAS Detector at CERN. Photograph: Divya Rao Heffley.

The Invisible Photograph: From Underground to Subatomic

We’ve taken you from photographs stored Underground in a limestone mine and Andy Warhol drawings Trapped in an Amiga computer, to Extraterrestrial image data captured by a Lunar Orbiter and photographic treasures Discarded and rescued from the mists of obscurity by artist Joachim Schmid. Our five-part documentary series, The Invisible Photograph, reaches its final stop on a journey that has spanned the Atlantic Ocean with Subatomic: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, set at CERN, an epicenter of research in particle physics. See the documentary now and enjoy behind-the-scenes access to CERN’s ATLAS and AEgIS experiments, where photographic imaging—both digital and analog—is being used to visualize the subatomic world.

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The death of Fabienne Cherisma, from the series Haiti, 2010, © Nathan Weber/NBW Photo.

When Fabienne Cherisma was shot and killed by a police officer for looting in the aftermath of Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake of 2010, Nathan Weber was there to capture the scene on camera, as seen in January’s This Picture selection. But Weber’s photograph shows us an event that seems tragic on more than one level, fanning the flames of an old controversy: When should a documentary photographer put down the camera and lend a helping hand?

In his own commissioned response to this photograph, Fred Ritchin challenges the trope of the photographer-as-vulture, a sensation-seeker who tries to make a buck on someone else’s misfortune. Maybe the real issue, Ritchin argues, is the way the photograph is being used. When a single photographic moment is made to stand in for an event of lasting duration, we lose the benefit of the full story, the before-and-after that brackets every newsworthy event. And, perhaps unfairly, that single and oft-heralded decisive moment gets blown out of proportion as a result. Given the possibilities of the digital environment, it is now easier than ever to provide additional context to the interested reader. But the impact of the single iconic photograph under a front-page headline – whether in print or online – is undeniable. It’s a useful tool for selling a story. And since the photographer often has little control over how his or her image is placed in that story, is the entire news media industry at fault for making a single image stand in for a nuanced event? Or do we, as digitally-savvy readers, have a responsibility to seek out the relevant context and build a fuller picture for ourselves?

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Film still from ‘Subatomic: The European Organization for Nuclear Research,’ the final installment of The Invisible Photograph documentary series.

The Invisible Photograph: World Premiere of Subatomic set for February 26, 2015

Join us for the fifth and final documentary world premiere for The Invisible Photograph, set at the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the border between France and Switzerland! The same series that has featured photographs buried underground, retrieved from old Amiga floppy discs, rescued from data created in outer space, and resuscitated from the trash heap, now journeys to its final destination to explore how photographic technologies are being used to visualize the subatomic world. Join us on February 26^th for the world premiere screening of Subatomic and enjoy custom cocktails, lively discussions, and a chance to meet CERN scientists! Click here to read more and register.

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