The Bittersweet Season: Loving What Is with Beate Sass & Ruth Steinberg
Ruth Steinberg and Beate Sass
The Bittersweet Season: Loving What Is with Beate Sass & Ruth Steinberg
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, July 19th, 7 pm EDT
Join the Kinship community for a new monthly offering (the third Wednesday of the month) where we celebrate our members and invite them into a dynamic conversation about their personal projects.
This month we will be speaking with Kinship members Beate Sass and Ruth Steinberg, two photographers who are lovingly photographing the bittersweet moments that arise in their relationships with their aging parents. Together we will explore the ways in which photography encourages us to find beauty in the most familiar places while calling us to love life as it is.
Beate Sass has been photographing her father during her visits to New Mexico since her mother died in 2013. More recently, she has also been photographing the Albuquerque landscape as a means of self-care. Her journey has been an exploration of the deep connection she has to the place she grew up and the love for a father whose mental and physical capacities have been slowly declining. Beate will also be sharing images from her artist book I Belong To You + You to Me.
Ruth Steinberg will be sharing photographs from her project Hold Fast which features Ruth’s 98-year-old mother, Tsyvia, who lives alone in a rental apartment while navigating her world with fierce independence. This body of work counters the typical narrative on aging and represents the many unseen elder members of our society who live their lives as fully as possible despite the limitations of their bodies. Ruth’s images were made over several years, from 2015 to 2022. They reveal the slow but inexorable changes that accompany aging.
Content Guidance: this talk contains one image that features nudity.
Beate Sass is an Atlanta-based photographer whose fascination with people and storytelling has been shaped by her childhood experiences traveling and living abroad and as a mother and advocate of a daughter who experiences disability. Beate utilizes the powerful and visual aspect of photography in combination with the written word, to highlight and amplify the voices of those who are often overlooked. Beate’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions in the Southeast region including The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Southeast Museum of Photography. Her portfolios have been published in Lenswork, Oxford America, and South x Southeast Photomagazine. Beate has found creative solutions for elevating the impact of her work and making it accessible to broad and diverse audiences. In 2016, her project, Real Stories, Real People, was printed in a tabloid format and distributed to Georgia Legislators and local libraries. In 2017, a large-scale installation of her I am Decatur portraits and accompanying storieswere displayed on the downtown bandstand, in the City of Decatur. @beatesassphoto
Ruth Steinberg is a photo-based artist who uses the camera as a tool to open doors of conversation, lifting the voices of her subjects. Through visual storytelling she examines facets of dignity, resilience, and presence within marginalized communities, particularly with the elderly. Her work has been shown across North America and internationally including the Atrium Art Gallery in Ottawa, LACP Centre of Photography in California, and FotoNostrum, Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona. In 2017, as part of an intergenerational chain of mentorship, Steinberg was selected to exhibit in Continuum: Karsh Award artists welcome a new generation. In 2022, she received first place for the Figureworks Award. Steinberg lives in Ottawa, on the unceeded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation.
Beate Sass
Beate Sass
Ruth Steinberg
Ruth Steinberg
