Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, July 26th, at 7 pm EDT
Lesly Deschler Canossi's rich and multi-layered practice includes making, mentoring, and rewriting photo history. As an independent photo educator and mother artist with a strong urge to widen the lens of representation, she works to amplify a range of photo practitioners who have been omitted or written out of its rich history. During this week's talk, Lesly will share her photographic project Domestic Negotiations (2012 - ongoing), the educational project Women Picturing Revolution, and her recent co-edited book project Black Motherhood, Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, 2023).
Join us for a dynamic and layered conversation on creativity and representational justice as we explore photography’s multiple histories: as an artistic medium, as social text, as a technological tool, and as a cultural practice.
Lesly Deschler Canossi is an artist, photo educator, and cultural producer. She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she focused on the museological object's role in the construction of culture. Her research aims to reframe the history of photography, better reflecting a story of innovation that includes women. As an educator, she is interested in guiding conversations in support of deep creativity and representational justice.
In 2016, she co-founded Women Picturing Revolution (WPR), an organization dedicated to women-identifying photographers who have documented conflicts and crises in private realms and public spaces. In 2019 WPR presented at the Tate Modern on the photographic representation of Black motherhood and in 2023 published Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press). Her personal and teaching practice centers on themes of care, mother(ing), and grief. Her course and critique group Into the Fold: Mother Artist Identity, explores artist/parent identity through lens and performance-based works and was the first of its kind offered at a major photographic institution. Her photographic series, Domestic Negotiations (2012 - ongoing) explores autonomy while navigating the demands of partnership, motherhood, and professional obligations.
Lesly is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and works as an independent producer leading seminars, lecturing, and curating panels for educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and corporate clients. In conversation with participants, Lesly examines visual storytelling for social change and the impact of images on public policy. For over 14 years Lesly ran Fiber Ink Studio, printing for some of the world's greatest artists and institutions, from emerging to high profile. Her expertise includes silver gelatin, analog type C, and wide-format pigment printing. Lesly lives in Beacon, New York with her family on a micro homestead that includes honeybees.
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, 2023), eds Lesly Dechler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, cover image by Andrea Chung
Lesly Deschler Canossi, Domestic Negotiations, (ICP EDU Books, 2014)
Lesly Deschler Canossi
Lesly Deschler Canossi
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, 2023), eds Lesly Dechler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, cover image by Andrea Chung
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, 2023), eds Lesly Dechler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, cover image by Andrea Chung
