Ziyah Gafic

1:23:20 Memory as Resistance: Archives, Inheritance, and the Politics of Remembering Who decides how memory endures and what role does photography play in shaping collective narratives? Images have long been a tool for preserving, reclaiming and reinterpreting personal and collective histories. From family albums to colonial archives, photography carries the weight of identity and inheritance, shaping how stories are told, whose voices are heard and what is remembered. This conversation centres on perspectives that have too often been misrepresented or overlooked, opening up a more nuanced understanding of how memory is constructed and contested through photography. Writer, educator and curator Max Houghton is joined by Sana Ginwalla, founder of Everyday Lusaka and Zambia Belonging, a counter archive rooted in Lusaka’s studio histories, and Director and contributing photographer to the VII Foundation Ziyah Gafic, whose early life was shaped by the siege of Sarajevo and experiences of displacement. Together, they reflect on photography’s role in holding memory, resisting erasure and reimagining the past through lived experience. This event is held in collaboration with Laura El-Tantawy of PLATFORM2020, an online hub for documentary photography, rooted in Africa & SWANA and open to the world. PhotoWings PhotoWings 54:26 Book Club – Ed Kashi, The Cali Years The Cali Years is a 25-year collection of Ed Kashi’s archive from 1979-2004, from his time spent living in California. This significant period marked the development of a college graduate into a renowned visual storyteller. This motley collection of images contains everything from family life to celebrities, from magazine assignments to in-depth personal projects. What was originally intended to be a small zine became a fold-out hand-bound collectible book. This collaborative project made in Ed’s studio with Brenda Bingham and Michael Curry will be produced in a limited edition of 100. In this event – hosted by Ziyah Gafic – Ed, Brenda, and Michael discuss the purpose and production of this book. PhotoWings 47:56 “Congo in Conversation” with Finbarr O’Reilly As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, swiftly closing down borders, Finbarr O’Reilly and 11 Congolese photographers—who were collaborating on a vast project addressing the human, social and ecological challenges that the DRC faces today—quickly adapted themselves to the new reality and created a unique collaborative online chronicle, an uninterrupted and unprecedented stream of articles, photo essays, and videos housed on a dedicated website called “Congo in Conversation” that has also resulted in a bilingual monograph of the same name. The 11th Carmignac Photojournalism Award funded the project. In this VII Insider talk, VII agency photographer Ziyah Gafic and Finbarr discuss the project’s evolution and execution, the history and politics of photojournalism in the Congo, the importance of diversity and representation in photojournalistic narratives, and using institutional power and privilege to lift up underrepresented voices and develop the next generation of storytellers. Finbarr O’Reilly is an independent photographer and multimedia journalist, and the author of the nonfiction memoir, Shooting Ghosts, A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War (Penguin Random House 2017). Finbarr lived for 12 years in West and Central Africa and has spent two decades covering conflicts in Congo, Chad, Sudan, Afghanistan, Libya, and Gaza. He is the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize exhibition photographer and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His photography and multimedia work has earned numerous industry honors, including First Place in the Portraits category at the 2019 World Press Photo Awards. He was also winner of the World Press Photo of the Year in 2006 and earned a 2020 Emmy for the PBS Frontline documentary, Ebola in Congo. Finbarr is a Canon Ambassador. Ziyah Gafic is an award-winning photojournalist and videographer based in Sarajevo focusing on societies locked in a perpetual cycle of violence and Muslim communities around the world. He covered major stories in over 50 countries. Ziyah’s work received many prestigious awards such as multiple awards at World Press Photo, Grand Prix Discovery of the Year at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Hasselblad Masters Award, City of Perpignan Award for Young Reporters at Visa pour l’Image, Photo District News, Getty Images grant for editorial photography, TED fellowship, Prince Claus grant, and Magnum Emergency fund grant. His work is regularly published in leading international publications. Ziyah authored several monographs including “Troubled Islam – short stories from troubled societies”, “Quest for Identity,” and the most recent, “Heartland.” PhotoWings 49:49 Book Club – Zalmaï, Dread and Dreams in Afghanistan In this Book Club event, Ziyah Gafic speaks with Zalmaï about his book “Dread and Dreams.” Afghan-born photographer Zalmaï was forced to flee to Switzerland at the age of 15 after the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As a freelance photographer, Zalmaï spent years capturing the human cost of war around the world and in his home country, Afghanistan, where he also sees signs of hope. Dread and Dreams brings together photographs Zalmaï made between 2008 and 2013 against the backdrop of the 14-year U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that culminated in 2014 with the withdrawal of American troops. PhotoWings 38:16 Book Club – Rehab Eldalil, “The Longing of The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken” In this Book Club event, Ziyah Gafic speaks with Rehab Eldalil, about her project “The Longing Of The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken,” which won the FotoEvidence W Award (which is supported by The VII Foundation and the Grodzins Fund). Rehab’s project is a means of reconnecting to her roots and involved working collaboratively with the Bedouin community of South Sinai, Egypt, to explore the notion of belonging and the interconnectedness of people and land. PhotoWings 45:31 Book Club - Ukraine – A War Crime In this Book Club event, Ziyah Gafic speaks with Svetlana Bachevanova and Sarah Leen about Ukraine: A War Crime. A compilation of work by 93 photojournalists from 25 countries who united to share their firsthand experience covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “Ukraine – A War Crime” is the FotoEvidence 2023 award winner. The book collects visual evidence of the violence and war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil. As such, it will serve as a powerful tool for mobilization, legal prosecution, and as an historical document for future generations. PhotoWings 1:09:03 Newspaper Club – Ali Arkady and Eric Bouvet In this “Newspaper Club” event – a special episode of our Book Club series hosted by Ziyah Gafic – we will look at two recent examples of photographer’s newspapers: Ali Arkady’s “Strappado” project on Iraq 2016 and Eric Bouvet’s Ukraine journal 2022. In addition to the stories of Iraq and Ukraine presented in the newspapers, we will discuss why Ali and Eric opted for newspapers to showcase their work and how they produced them. PhotoWings 1:15:34 Monumental Photography: Investigating Representations of Colonialism and Nationalism Using The VII Foundation exhibition, MONUMENTAL: The Dome of the Rock by Ziyah Gafić and Notre-Dame de Paris by Tomas van Houtryve, as a launch pad, this discussion will feature presentations on photography’s history and politics of representation in France and Israel/Palestine. Taking a step back from these places in the present, this panel will explore how particular understandings of faith, identity, colonialism, and nationalism have been enabled by visual symbols. Moderator: Dr. David Campbell, Education Director, The VII Foundation Speakers: Professor Jonathan Long Co-director, Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, Durham University Dr. Sary Zananiri Cultural practitioner and theorist Ziyah Gafic Contributing photographer, The VII Foundation Tomas van Houtryve Contributing photographer, The VII Foundation PhotoWings 1:16:25 Bosnia 30 years later - Lessons from reporting the Bosnian War On 6 April 1992, as part of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Serbian forces attacked the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, setting off a three-year war marked by ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Bosnian War – which killed 100,000 civilians and soliders, displaced more than two million people, and saw tens of thousands of women raped – was long regarded, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II. NATO airstrikes at the end of August 1995 – after the Srebrenica genocide and prompted by the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace that month – forced Republika Srpska forces to retreat and led to negotiations that produced the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995. Based on ethnic divisions and secured by the international community, the Dayton agreement has resulted in a three-decades-long fragile peace. In this event, VII photographers who covered the Bosnian War will review how they reported the conflict – with an emphasis on the civilian experience – and reflect on both what was and was not photographed, as well as the impact their images had (or did not have). The discussion will also focus on what lessons can be learned from the Bosnian experience for visual journalists working in conflict zones today. Featuring The Estate of Alexandra Boulat, Ziyah Gafic, Ron Haviv, and Paul Lowe. PhotoWings 1:18:40 Black Garden Trilogy by Jason Eskenazi Jason Eskenazi, Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, will discusses his Black Garden Trilogy (Wonderland~Black Garden~Departure Lounge) that spans 25 years of work published by Red Hook Editions. After Wonderland was published to great acclaim in 2008, Jason worked for a while as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (guarding “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’”) before returning east. The result of his wanderings through the Middle East, Russia, and Europe, Black Garden and Departure Lounge complete his trilogy with photos from his travels after Wonderland’s publication as well as from his archive from 1991-2017. Indeed, Jason said in an interview that the title of the last book refers to a room near the front door of a loft Jason shared with other photojournalists where they would wait for taxis to arrive to take them to the airport. Each book has 314 photos numbered sequentially through all 3 books with 9 chapters. Jason and moderator Ziyah Gafic discuss Jason’s approach to long-term projects, editing and sequences of the books, and touch on bookmaking and publishing. Jason is co-owner of Red Hook Editions in Brooklyn, and co-editor of Dog Food photo zine. He lives between New York and Istanbul. PhotoWings 1:08:27 Driftless with Danny Wilcox Frazier Danny Wilcox Frazier joined Ziyah Gafic in conversation for a VII Insider Book Club discussion of Driftless. Danny was joined by special guest Gabriel Stutzman, one of the book’s subjects. This recording will be available here until February 6 to Freemium VII Insider subscribers. After that, it will be available to Premium subscribers along with all other VII Insider resources. In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer and Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier’s camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more than that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. – Alexa Dilworth, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University PhotoWings 1:06:54 While the Fires Burn A Glacier Odyssey with Daniel Schwartz — Part I This series of three webinars with Daniel Schwartz sheds light on the origins and metamorphoses, on the making-of, and the intellectual context of this climate crises-driven project accomplished between 2009 and 2017. The series is moderated by Ziyah Gafic. For While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey the author embarked on a journey that led from the relics of Holocene glaciation in Switzerland and the Alps into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to collapsing glaciers on three continents. The outcome, a “glaciology in pictures,” as it were, is the result of a synthesis of scientific observation and artistic action. The environmental context makes the project the counterpart and continuation of Delta. The Perils, Profits and Politics of Water in South and Southeast Asia (1997), one of the earliest comprehensive photojournalistic studies on the climate crisis. While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey was realized partly in collaboration with institutes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and of the University of Bern, published in 2017 by Thames & Hudson and exhibited in 2018 at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland. Part I. From Delta to Glacier The initial webinar will introduce approaches and strategies—photojournalistic, conceptual and science-supported—and discuss the reasons for merging terrestrial and aerial photography. Together, these practices have found very diverse applications during the past thirty years—at first documenting the densely populated coastal habitats in Asia increasingly endangered by sea-level rise as a consequence of the climate crisis, then, more recent, representing the accelerated agony of Alpine and Equatorial glaciers as well as of West Asian glaciers where, in the early 19th century, mountaineering and world politics had met and where conflict and glacial melt today simultaneously occur, with the risk of looming war for resources. PhotoWings 1:07:25 While the Fires Burn A Glacier Odyssey with Daniel Schwartz — Part II This series of three webinars with Daniel Schwartz sheds light on the origins and metamorphoses, on the making-of, and the intellectual context of this climate crises-driven project accomplished between 2009 and 2017. The series is moderated by Ziyah Gafic. For While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey the author embarked on a journey that led from the relics of Holocene glaciation in Switzerland and the Alps into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to collapsing glaciers on three continents. The outcome, a “glaciology in pictures,” as it were, is the result of a synthesis of scientific observation and artistic action. The environmental context makes the project the counterpart and continuation of Delta. The Perils, Profits and Politics of Water in South and Southeast Asia (1997), one of the earliest comprehensive photojournalistic studies on the climate crisis. While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey was realized partly in collaboration with institutes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and of the University of Bern, published in 2017 by Thames & Hudson and exhibited in 2018 at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland. PhotoWings 51:09 While the Fires Burn A Glacier Odyssey with Daniel Schwartz — Part III This series of three webinars with Daniel Schwartz sheds light on the origins and metamorphoses, on the making-of, and the intellectual context of this climate crises-driven project accomplished between 2009 and 2017. The series is moderated by Ziyah Gafic. For While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey the author embarked on a journey that led from the relics of Holocene glaciation in Switzerland and the Alps into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to collapsing glaciers on three continents. The outcome, a “glaciology in pictures,” as it were, is the result of a synthesis of scientific observation and artistic action. The environmental context makes the project the counterpart and continuation of Delta. The Perils, Profits and Politics of Water in South and Southeast Asia (1997), one of the earliest comprehensive photojournalistic studies on the climate crisis. While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey was realized partly in collaboration with institutes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and of the University of Bern, published in 2017 by Thames & Hudson and exhibited in 2018 at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland. Part III. Inquiries Concerning the Memory and Domestication of Glaciers Being a visual manifesto aimed at structural change in the way humanity deals with the climate crisis, the concluding webinar will discuss methods applied during the realization of While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey. These include the melding of the autobiographical and the socio-political, archival and archaeological research as artist practice, appropriation of historical documents in storytelling as well as the typographic word-work paired with photographs to extend their meaning. The experiential of the project echoes processes that accompanied the understanding and moral perception of glacier landscapes since they became object of study in the late 18th century. PhotoWings 58:09 Book Club – Ed Kashi, Abandoned Moments In this Book Club event, Ziyah Gafic speaks with Ed Kashi about his new book Abandoned Moments – A Love Letter to Photography. According to the publisher’s blurb: “If the decisive moment reflects reality in tune with the photographer’s intuition, flawlessly combining composition and timing, then the abandoned moment is the consequence of a fractional instant of surrender. This collection, made over a 40-year period by renowned photographer Ed Kashi, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography’s intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space.” PhotoWings 1:16:25 Bosnia 30 years later Lessons from reporting the Bosnian War On 6 April 1992, as part of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Serbian forces attacked the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, setting off a three-year war marked by ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Bosnian War – which killed 100,000 civilians and soliders, displaced more than two million people, and saw tens of thousands of women raped – was long regarded, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II. NATO airstrikes at the end of August 1995 – after the Srebrenica genocide and prompted by the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace that month – forced Republika Srpska forces to retreat and led to negotiations that produced the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995. Based on ethnic divisions and secured by the international community, the Dayton agreement has resulted in a three-decades-long fragile peace. In this event, VII photographers who covered the Bosnian War will review how they reported the conflict – with an emphasis on the civilian experience – and reflect on both what was and was not photographed, as well as the impact their images had (or did not have). The discussion will also focus on what lessons can be learned from the Bosnian experience for visual journalists working in conflict zones today. Featuring The Estate of Alexandra Boulat, Ziyah Gafic, Ron Haviv, and Paul Lowe. PhotoWings 9:45 Lessons Learned | Ziyah Gafic | Foundry 2021 Ziyah Gafic is an award-winning photojournalist and videographer based in Sarajevo focusing on societies locked in a perpetual cycle of violence and Muslim communities around the world. He covered major stories in over 50 countries including conflicts in Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Ziyah’s work received many prestigious awards such as multiple awards at World Press Photo, Grand Prix Discovery of the Year at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Hasselblad Masters Award, City of Perpignan Award for Young Reporters at Visa pour l’Image, Photo District News, Getty Images grant for editorial photography, TED fellowship, Prince Claus grant, and Magnum Emergency fund grant. His work is regularly published in leading international publications. Ziyah authored several monographs including Troubled Islam – Short Stories from Troubled Societies, Quest for Identity, and the most recent, Heartland. Ziyah is TED speaker and Logan fellow. PhotoWings 1:02:54 Representing Refugees – Telling the Story of Migrants Coming to Europe The stories of people on the move are often told through dispatches from reporters who drop in periodically to cover the “migrant and refugee crisis,” thereby privileging an outside perspective. People on the move are frequently nameless and dehumanized, deepening the rift between them and the local population, creating an atmosphere of alienation, antipathy, and, too often, violence. This event begins with a presentation by David Campbell discussing research on the politics of refugee representations. It then showcases a project that mitigates this fragmented and distorted narrative by providing migrants in Bosnia and Herzegovina with basic media training and a portal, “Dispatches in Exile,” through which to publish their reports and tell their stories directly. The “Dispatches in Exile” project is led by VII Academy curator Ziyah Gafic and produced in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Ziyah will discuss how this project was created, its purpose, and its impact. PhotoWings