On May 29, 2025, MoCP presented a series of conversations exploring authorship, representation, and the dissemination of information as they relate to the past, present, and future of photography. This special edition of Focal Point Extras captures a discussion between photographer Susan Meiselas and writer, critic, and photographer Teju Cole on the topic “What Does It Mean to Look at These Photographs?” The two consider three bodies of work by Meiselas spanning several decades to examine the politics of looking at photographs—especially when those images depict stories of human struggle, suffering, and conflict.

On May 29, 2025, MoCP presented a series of conversations that explored topics of authorship, representation, and the dissemination of information as they relate to the past, present, and future of photography.

This special edition of Focal Point Extras captures the conversation between scholar and educator Laura Wexler (Yale University) and artist, art historian, and educator Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) on the topic of “The Living Archive.” The two discuss artists who work with archives to expand fixed notions of history, and people who call for a reassessment of ownership and control over photographed people within archives.

This symposium was in conjunction with the exhibition, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography in Dialogue with the MoCP Collection curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Laura wexler, and MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor.

Image credit:

Aaron Turner, Untitled, Self Extended, from Black Alchemy Vol. 3, 2020

On May 29, 2025, MoCP presented a series of conversations that explored topics of authorship, representation, and the dissemination of information as they relate to the past, present, and future of photography.

This special edition of Focal Point Extras captures the conversation between artists Eric Gottesman and Wendy Ewald as part of a full-day symposium at MoCP titled Conversations on Collaboration in Photography. The two explored the ways artists place collaboration with the photographed person at the forefront of their process, and how they convey their partnership using text, staging techniques, or experimental exhibition platforms. 

This symposium was in conjunction with the exhibition, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography in Dialogue with the MoCP Collection curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Laura wexler, and MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor.

Images discussed in this conversation include:

Wendy Ewald

Ben Michel and Joseph Ashini, 1969

Wendy Ewald and Eric Gottesman

Ben Michel's sister touching Ben's picture after his death, 2008

To see the short film they discuss in the beginning of the lecture, please visit Eric Gottesman’s website here.

On May 29, 2025, MoCP presented a series of conversations that explored topics of authorship, representation, and the dissemination of information as they relate to the past, present, and future of photography.

This special edition of Focal Point Extras captures the conversation between artist Dawoud Bey and scholar Leigh Raiford on the topic of “The Photographed Person was Always There.” The two explored the critical role of the photographed person in portraiture, and how they shape images and their meaning.

This symposium was in conjunction with the exhibition, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography in Dialogue with the MoCP Collection curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Laura wexler, and MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor.

Images discussed in this conversation include:

Dawoud Bey, A Man in a Bowler Hat, from the Harlem, USA portfolio, 1976

Dawoud Bey, A Woman Waiting In The Doorway, from the Harlem, USA portfolio, 1976

Dawoud Bey, Untitled #7 (Branches and Woods), from Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017

For more information on Dawoud Bey’s work in the MoCP collection, please visit this link.

In this episode, MoCP Executive Director, Natasha Egan, sits down with artist Christina Fernandez. The two discuss Christina’s decades-long career in pushing the boundaries of photography, blending her personal history as a Mexican American woman with broader cultural narratives about migration, labor, and gender. Natasha and Christina additionally discuss a piece in the MoCP permanent collection by Sidian Liu. 

Christina Fernandez has been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Aart, the Getty, and MoMA New York, just to name a few. Ferndandez is a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship honoree. She is also an influential educator, currently serving as an associate professor at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California where she has been on faculty since 2001. Fernandez’s exhibition Multiple Exposures, is on view at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago from March 20 - August 3, 2025, and it the first major museum survey of her work and has traveled to institutions across the county for the last three years. 

In this episode, artists Meghann Riepenhoff and Penelope Umbrico chat with MoCP curator, Kristin Taylor. The two artists discuss their backgrounds and shared interests in experimenting and pushing the indexical qualities of photography, as well as the work of Alison Rossiter and Joanne Leonard.

Meghann Riepenhoff is most well-known for her largescale cyanotype prints that she creates by collaborating with ocean waves, rain, ice, snow, and coastal shores. She places sheets of light-sensitized paper in these water elements, allowing nature to act as the composer of what we eventually see on the paper. As the wind driven waves crash or the ice melts, dripping across the surface of the coated paper, bits of earth sediment like sand and gravel also become inscribed on the surface. The sun is the final collaborator, with its UV rays developing the prints and reacting with the light sensitizing chemical on the paper to draw out the Prussian blue color. These camera-less works harness the light capturing properties of photographic processes, to translate, in her words, “the landscape, the sublime, time, and impermanence.” 

Rieppenhoff’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, among many others. Her work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Harvard Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has published two monographs: Littoral Drift + Ecotone and Ice with Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery. She was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts, was an Affiliate at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Penelope Umbrico examines the sheer volume and ubiquity of images in contemporary culture. She uses various forms of found imagery—from online picture sharing websites to photographs in books and mail order catalogs—and appropriates the pictures to construct large-scale installations. She states: "I take the sheer quantity of images online as a collective archive that represents us—a constantly changing auto-portrait." In the MoCP permanent collection is a piece titled 8,146,774 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/10/10. It is an assemblage of numerous pictures that she found on the then widely used image-sharing website, Flickr, by searching for one of its most popular search terms: sunset. She then cropped the found files and created her own 4x6 inch prints on a Kodak Easy Share printer. She clusters the prints into an enormous array to underscore the universal human attraction to capture the sun’s essence. The title references the number of results she received from the search on the day she made the work: the first version of the piece created in 2007 produced 2,303,057 images while this version from only three years later in 2010 produced 8,146,774 images. 

Umbrico’s work has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Daegu Photography Biennale, Korea; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant; Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship; Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris. She is joining us today from her studio in Brooklyn, NY.

This episode features Jay Wolke and Eli Giclas in conversation with MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor. Jay and Eli discuss their photographic approaches to depict the built environment as a reflection of patterns of human consumption and an imbalanced relationship with nature. They also discuss their appreciation of works by Stan Douglas and Dawn Kim in the MoCP permanent collection.

Jay Wolke is an artist and educator based in Chicago, who is known for his decades-long practice of photographing people and architectural spaces. His work often explores the disparities between human ambition and its manifestation in the built environment. Through images made along highways, high rises, underpasses, over passes, rock quarries, casinos,  parks, and more, he shows, in his words “perpetual re-imaginings, capricious assemblies, ominous entanglements, and repeatedly regrettable consequences of human industry and hubris.”

He has several monographs, including Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway, 2004; and Same Dream Another Time, 2017. His works have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent print collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York MOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco MOMA, the MoCP, among others. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he was Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000-2005 and again from 2008-2013.

Eli Giclas is a Chicago-based photographer and designer whose projects in rich blacks, whites, and greys speak to an in-between-ness of action for the climate, and the consequences from broken relationships to nature. In his project Counting After Lightning (2021-2024), he makes large-scale images of industrial sites in the Midwest, representing patterns of consumption driven by extractive industries that we use for power. In contrast, another series, On Wing, 2022-2023, he shows volunteers and locations within an urban bird sanctuary, offering one story as a symbol of larger collective acts in healing. He states: “I consider our relationship to our planet and what must change to make a better, more thoughtful future possible…underscoring their collective reverence and the significance of their efforts.” Eli recently completed his MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, under the instruction of Jay Wolke, and he also completed his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Arizona in 2018.

In this episode, MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor, chats with Susan Meiselas and Wendy Ewald about their new publication titled Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. Made with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, the book is a deep dive into current and historical photographic projects about human stories. It spotlights how the person depicted is often left out of the history as a co-maker of the images and asks us to imagine a way forward from coercive photographic practices. 

Wendy Ewald received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. She was a senior research associate at Duke University and artist in residence at Amherst College for many years. She has authored or contributed to several books, including "Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians" and "Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999." 

Susan Meiselas received a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2019. Her work has been widely featured in news publications and museums alike, and she has been the president of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, whose mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography and Susan has been a member of this organization since 1980. Some of her publications include "Carnival Strippers" (1976), "Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979"  and  "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History" (1997).

To see works in the MoCP permanent collection by artists presented in the book or discussed this episode, please go here.

This episode of Focal Point features two exhibiting artists from LOVE: Still Not the Lesser (on view August 17 - December 23, 2023) in conversation with Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator. Jorian Charlton (b. 1989 Canada) is an artist who focuses on her generation of peers within the Caribbean diaspora—authoring their canon of Black Canadian representation. Yuge Zhou 周雨歌 (b. 1985 China) applies her perspective of a Chinese diaspora immigration experience for the video series Love Letters (summer) and Love Letters (winter) 2021. Together, they discuss their respective inspirations and artistic practices, as well as works by Carrie Mae Weems and Dylan Vitone in the MoCP collection.

View Charlton's work – https://joriancharlton.com/

and Zhou’s work – https://yugezhou.com/.

In this episode, MoCP Executive Director Natasha Egan leads a discussion with Chicago-based artists and educators Bob Thall and Cecil McDonald, Jr.

Thall was an educator at Columbia College Chicago from 1978-2017, and both Egan and McDonald were once students in his classroom. Thall and McDonald discuss their mutually influential relationship to art-making and to teaching, and the legacies of photographic education in Chicago. They also discuss their thoughts on work by Kathryn Harrison and Joseph Jachna in the MoCP permanent collection.