Women Picturing Revolution & Lola Flash

Please join us for a conversation between Women Picturing Revolution and photographer Lola Flash during which they will examine the role photography plays in documenting LGBTQ communities in both public and personal spaces. For more than thirty years, photographer Lola Flash has used the camera to elevate and celebrate the lives of queer people of color. Through her early activism work with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), her images of queer life in New York City and her latest work – a series of women over the age of seventy, Flash offers specificity, power and a presence that cannot be ignored. Alongside Flash’s work, a special focus of this evening will be highlighting emerging imagemakers around the globe, particularly young people of color. Together, we will explore a broader examination on identity, how one navigates public and private spaces, how communities are formed, and how safety is established and maintained.

About the participants:

Through leading seminars, curating panels, and organizing film series, Women Picturing Revolution (WPR) co-creators Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago are reclaiming and retelling history in a manner that is both radical and necessary. By highlighting the work of female identifying photographers who document conflicts, crises, and revolution in private realms and public spaces, WPR sheds light on personal and political experiences that are often overlooked or underrepresented.

Zoraida Lopez-Diago is a photographer, curator, and co-creator of Women Picturing Revolution (WPR). She studied political science at Trinity College and Fine Arts at Hunter College. In 2015, Zoraida was the assistant curator of Picturing Black Girlhood, an exhibition highlighting important contributions of Black girls in the US. Zoraida is currently photographing children of undocumented farmers in upstate New York and was recently accepted into Magnum Foundation’s Counter History Laboratory to further develop her upcoming project concerning the lives of Black and Latino boys who were shot by police officers.

Lesly Deschler Canossi is a photographer, faculty at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and co-creator of Women Picturing Revolution. She holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Lesly’s most recent courses include Image, Zine and Social Change and Navigating the Domestic: Mother As Artist which explores the intersection of mother and artist. Since its founding, WPR has lead seminars and panels at institutions including Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, ICP, and MICA. Zoraida and Lesly are currently co-editing Women Picturing Revolution: Representations of Black Motherhood in Contemporary Photography , a volume of selected essays on the subject, which will be published in 2019/20.

Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. She received her bachelor’s degree from Maryland Institute and her Masters from London College of Printing, in the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4×5 film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. In 2008, she was a resident at Lightwork and in 2015, she participated at Alice Yard, in Trinidad. Flash was awarded an Art Matters grant, which allowed her to further two projects, in Brazil and London. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her work is also featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, currently on exhibit across the US. Most recently, she co-led a talk at the Bronx Museum with Sur Rodney Sur. They spoke to the glaring lack of women artists and POC, with respect to the Art AIDS America exhibition. Pen + Brush Gallery’s inaugural exhibition this year, features a 30 year retrospective of her significant photographs. Flash’s work welcomes audiences who are willing to not only look but see.