exposure studio sessions

Exposure Studio is an online program that took place between June and August 2020. It offered Calgary based photographers an opportunity to develop their practice through a series of discussion-based events. The international roster of speakers included Alec Soth, Andrew Jackson, Louie Palu, MaryAnn Camilleri, Natasha Caruana, Rania Matar and Vincent Cianni. Exposure Studio promotes social cohesion through art, and encourages community, connection and collaboration during the pandemic. 

 These recorded Exposure Studio sessions allow you to engage with the speaker program. We hope it inspires and helps develop the practices of our online photography community. To access Rania Matar and Vincent Cianni’s Exposure Studio sessions please see below.

Please note that these recorded sessions have been transcribed to allow for subtitles and edited to provide viewers with accessible video content that is easy to engage with post-live event. If you wish to view with subtitles, click the ‘CC’ button at the bottom of the video. 

session 6: Vincent Cianni

Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer and educator whose work focuses on social justice issues. His celebrated works Gays in the Military and We Skate Hardcore explore community and memory, the human condition, and the use of image and text. 

Cianni’s work has been exhibited internationally and his photographs are represented in numerous public and private collections. The Archive for Documentary Arts at Duke University established a study collection of his documentary projects in 2007. We Skate Hardcore was voted Best Book Design by the American Association of University Presses.  His work has also been reproduced in photo journals and anthologies such as The New York Times, Huffington Post, Double Take, Photograph, Creative Camera, The Sun, and The New Yorker.

During this session Cianni will share his experiences with and advice on community-engaged projects rooted in social activism: the logistics, challenges, rewards, insights and ethical issues that result from socially engaged work. He will also address approaches to sequencing and editing work for publication.

session 2: Rania Matar

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from – in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality, within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide. She has published three books: L'Enfant-Femme, 2016, A Girl and Her Room, 2012, and Ordinary Lives, 2009.

During this session Rania Matar will talk about her practice as a portrait photographer: how she conceptualizes projects, how she finds subjects, builds rapport, and navigates relationships with the people she photographs. Matar will also provide advice on preparing a body of work for exhibition and guidance on sequencing and editing for publication.