Vincent Cianni

A Conversation About His New Book Gays in the Military with Alison Nordström

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 7pm

Free admission. Seating is very limited.
Q & A to follow the discussion.
Copies of Gays in the Military, published by Daylight Books, will be available for sale and for signing by the artist after the talk.

Please join us for a conversation between photographer Vincent Cianni and author and curator Alison Nordström. The two will discuss work from Cianni’s book, Gays in the Military (Daylight Books, 2014) in which Nordström contributed an essay.

About Gays in the Military

Through compelling photographs and interviews made over three years on road trips across the US, Vincent Cianni (born 1952) has created an important historical record of the struggles of gay and lesbian veterans and service members in the US military. As the Human Rights Commission attests, the US military has a long history of civil rights abuses against homosexuals, with harassment and discrimination frequently resulting in lost careers. In many cases, these men and women—highly skilled, well educated, patriotic, courageous and productive—had attained high rank, received numerous medals and held top-level jobs essential to the military. With essays by Alison Nordström, LT Donald R. Bramer and Alan Steinman, M.D. shedding light on the cultural, personal and political consequences of the ban on homosexuality, this volume tells the stories of men and women who served in silence and oftentimes were penalized and prohibited from receiving the benefits accorded them for serving in the military. See more on Daylight Book’s website.

About Vincent Cianni & Alison Nordström

Vincent Cianni (Newburgh, NY) is a documentary/fine art photographer and educator. He graduated from Penn State University (BS Community Development), attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, and completed his graduate work at SUNY New Paltz (MFA Photography).

Cianni was printer for Danny Lyon from 1988-1992 and has been teaching photography in universities design school since 1993. In addition to teaching at Parsons School of Design, he has also taught and conducted workshops at the International Center for Photography, the Center for Documentary Studies, France and Colombia. He was a private dealer of vintage and contemporary photography, Associate Director of Gallery 292 and Sarah Morthland Gallery. He has worked as a freelance curator, editor and archivist since 1994.

Anthropologically based, his documentary work has explored community and memory, the human condition, as well as the use of image and text stemming from personal experience and discovery.

From 1994 through 2003, Cianni photographed We Skate Hardcore in the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographs from We Skate Hardcore, published by New York University Press and the Center for Documentary Studies in September 2004, have been widely published in photo journals and anthologies – Double Take, Aperture, Creative Camera, The Photo Review, The New Yorker, La Fotografia, Brooklyn Bridge, The Sun Magazine, and recently in The Museum of the City of New York’s publication New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City.

A major exhibition was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006 and the project has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Verve Gallery; Howard Greenberg Gallery; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the 7th International Photography Festival in Mannheim; the Fullerton Museum; the George Eastman House; and the Griffin Museum.

The Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collection Library at Duke University has established a study archive to collect, preserve and store Vincent Cianni’s documentary projects including negatives, darkroom, and notes made in conjunction with them.

Cianni’s photographs are represented in numerous public and private collections: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The George Eastman House, The Philadelphia Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research; The International Collection, Polaroid Corporation; The Worcester Art Museum; The Southeast Museum of Photography; The Biblioteque National de France, Paris; The Buhl Collection; The Reader’s Digest Collection, Pleasantville, NY; Brooklyn Union Gas, Brooklyn, NY; and the Musee Pierre Noel, Saint-Die-des-Vosges, France among others as well as numerous private collections. Visit his website at www.vincentcianni.com.

Alison Nordström is an independent writer and curator specializing in photography. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts she was formerly Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography, and Senior Curator of Photographs/Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House. She has worked with students of photography, art and photographic preservation at numerous international institutions. She is the author of over 100 published essays on photographic topics, and has curated over 100 photographic exhibitions in nine countries, including Lewis Hine, Truth/Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, and Ideas in Things: Photography and Materiality. She is currently Consulting Curator for International Programs at the Griffin Museum, Curator/Lead Writer for the Dutch project Photographs After Baldus, and will curate the 2015 iteration of Fotofestiwal Lodz, in Poland. She holds the PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.