“I wanted to show what I knew to be real because I had experienced it first-hand myself” – Zun Lee
Insider/Outsider is a panel discussion that explores a photographers right and role in producing in-depth reportage within specific communities. Moderated by David Gonzalez of the New York Times, this discussion features photographers who have immersed themselves into issues, cultures, and communities, and documented with sympathy and dignity the stories that brought them there.
Nona Faustine’s series “White Shoes” are nude self-portraits taken in and around the places associated with the 250-year history of slavery in New York City. Recently her work has received worldwide press coverage online and print in publications.
Quito Ziegler has organized a wide range of collaborative interdisciplinary projects in New York City’s queer+trans communities and co-founded the Department of Transformation artist collective and the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network, an immigrant rights organization which they co-directed from 2003-2006 while producing large-scale public photography projects on immigration issues.
In “Father Figure,” Zun Lee sought to capture manifestations of Black fatherhood largely ignored by mainstream media, while simultaneously finding redemption for his personal history. His current project, “Fade Resistance,” seeks to restore the narrative impact of thousands of found African American polaroids, and to fill a representational gap in the history of American snapshot photography.
Moderator
David González, New York Times
Panelists
Nona Faustine Simmons
Quito Ziegler
Zun Lee
Bios
David González is co-editor of the “Lens” blog and does the biweekly “Side Street” photo-essay feature for the City Room blog. As a long-time member of the metro desk of the New York Times, his work has often focused on the city’s neighborhoods and how they reflect the larger social and cultural issues in American society.
Since arriving at the Times from Newsweek Magazine in 1990, he has been the Bronx Bureau Chief, the About New York columnist and the Central America/Caribbean Bureau Chief. Most recently, he wrote the biweekly “Citywide” feature column, as well as having published a yearlong look at the life of an undocumented family in New York City.
His prizes include a 2008 Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for “House Afire,” a three-part series on the life of a struggling Pentecostal storefront church. He also was awarded Columbia University’s Mike Berger Award in May 1992 for his coverage of New York City and its neighborhoods.
Before entering journalism, he worked for several non-profit agencies active in New York City’s Latino and African-American communities. He was also the project coordinator at En Foco, a Bronx-based arts group which supports emerging Latino photographers. Mr. Gonzalez was born and raised in the Bronx. He earned a BA in psychology from Yale University and an MS degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Nona Faustine was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and the ICP-Bard MFA program (2013). Faustine was selected by writer/curator Charlotte Cotton as a 2014 Honorable Mention in the Camera Club of New York Competition.
Her work has received press in Huffington Post, "Hyperallergic," Greybook Magazine, Village Voice, the Guardian, and the blog "Dodge and Burn." Faustine's work has been exhibited at the Schomburg Center for Black Research in New York, NY; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ.
Quito Ziegler is a Brooklyn-based artist who likes to play with gender, glitter, string, community organizing, crocheted blankets, and their old Nikon camera. Lately they are particularly fond of collective movie-making experiences, playing in their garage studio, and volunteering at Sylvia’s Place, a queer youth shelter in NYC.
They have organized a wide range of collaborative interdisciplinary projects in New York City’s queer+trans communities including the Wrrqshop — a weekly intergenerational queer art salon — and the Queer Planet contingency of the People’s Climate March, hosting an intergenerational storytelling hour about the AIDS crisis, producing a series of performance commissions for a magical garden on the Lower East Side, and installing an art and performance lab in a legendary downtown gallery in conjunction with the MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival. Last year they organized a psychic chamber underground as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
A book of their photographs from Brooklyn’s radical queer/transgender community, recently on view at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, will be published in 2017. They are the former producer of the Moving Walls photography exhibition at the Open Society Foundations, where they also curated a permanent collection of human rights photography. They have curated a web gallery on lost transgender history for Visual AIDS, and have been collecting names of queer photographers for a future collective community history of queer NYC.
Quito has been working at the Open Society Foundations on and off since 2001, where they now coordinate global projects that explore the intersection of photography and human rights. They are a co-founder of the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network, an immigrant rights organization which they co-directed from 2003–2006 while producing large-scale public photography projects on immigration issues. They are a former board co-chair of NYC’s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and a current board member of the Third Wave Fund.
In 2008, they received an MFA from the International Center of Photography, where they now serve as faculty. They have been a featured speaker at the Harvard Divinity School and the camera club of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and many other random and interesting places.
Zun Lee is a self-taught photographer in Toronto, Canada. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago. Shooting since 2009, Zun initially honed his craft as a street photographer. His work has steadily garnered a dedicated fan base on various social media, especially on Yahoo’s Flickr, where he has amassed close to two million total views on his stream.
Originally trained as a physician, trusted interpersonal dynamics are an important component of his work. Zun aims to re-create some of these dynamics in his images, aiming to uncover unseen aspects of identity and connection. That interplay between identity and representation plays a pivotal role in his first long-form project, Father Figure. Zun sought to capture manifestations of Black fatherhood largely ignored by mainstream media, while simultaneously finding redemption for his personal history.
Zun's work has been published in the New York Times's "Lens" blog, and several magazines in the US and Brazil. He is a member of Aletheia Photo Collective, and was recently chosen as one of PDN's 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2014.