Renowned portrait photographers Martin Schoeller, B.A. Van Sise, and Jonathan Alpeyrie have all undertaken extensive projects photographing Holocaust survivors and global conflicts. Together in a panel moderated by Associated Press photojournalist Jacquelyn Martin, they will discuss their approaches to sharing the stories of survivors through portraiture.
Martin Schoeller is one of the world's preeminent contemporary portrait photographers. His signature style of extreme close-up portraiture has been utilized across his career, whether his subject is a celebrity or Holocaust survivor, encouraging the viewer to draw comparisons "between his subjects, challenging a viewer's existing notions of celebrity, value, and honesty." Here, a community takes shape from individual stories. Schoeller's portraits are exhibited and collected internationally, as well as part of the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Schoeller's exhibition Survivors: Faces of Life After the Holocaust. Photographs by Martin Schoeller, is the inaugural exhibition in the Rita Lowenstein Gallery at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist. He is author of the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark. He has previously been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as in group exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; a number of his portraits are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. His nonfiction and poetry have been featured in numerous publications, and he is a frequent reviewer for the New York Journal of Books.
Jacqueline Martin is a staff photojournalist with the Associated Press in Washington, DC, and a board member of the Women Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW), a non-profit that educates the public about the work of female photojournalists. Covering a diverse range of topics from the White House to enterprise feature projects, she has circumnavigated the globe covering every Secretary of State since Hillary Clinton and was the last photojournalist to have the opportunity to photograph Nelson Mandela prior to his death. Martin's portrait series and documentary project featuring people with albinism in Tanzania has been exhibited at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and in Kenya. Her work has been honored with awards from the White House New Photographers Association and National Press Photographers Association, as well as featured in WPOW's annual touring exhibitions.