Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, March 4th, at 7 pm EDT
Lesly Deschler Canossi's Substack, Widening the Lens, offers bite-sized, accessible pieces about photo and visual culture. Her writing has been a lighthouse for many of us at Kinship as we navigate the complicated and painful questions of this time. What role can photography play? Where has the medium gone wrong? And most importantly, how can beauty and art become acts of care?
Lesly was a Kinship guest in 2023, where she gave a talk about her personal photographic and curatorial work with Women Picturing Revolution.
Join us as we gather with Lesly again for an informal conversation about her latest creative project — writing weekly on visual culture, photography, and its relationship to our current synthetic-image era.
Over the next two months, she'll explore photographic history through the lens of truth and evidence, asking what past imagemakers can teach us about navigating synthetic media today. This Substack series is for anyone who cares about visual literacy: educators, journalists, marketers, advocates, anyone who uses images to communicate and needs practical frameworks for critical seeing in the AI age.
The question isn't whether AI has destroyed our ability to trust images. The question is whether we were ever asking the right questions of images in the first place.
This is research in progress. Your thoughts and challenges will shape the work. This conversation belongs to all of us.
Lesly Deschler Canossi is an artist, photography educator, and cultural producer who holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she focused on the museological object's role in constructing culture. Her research aims to reframe photography's history to better reflect a story of innovation that includes women, while her educational work centers on fostering deep creativity and representational justice.
In 2016, she co-founded Women Picturing Revolution (WPR), an organization dedicated to women-identifying photographers who document conflicts and crises in both private and public spaces. WPR presented on the photographic representation of Black motherhood at the Tate Modern in 2019 and published Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press) in 2022.
Her personal and teaching practice explores themes of care, mothering, and grief. Her groundbreaking course Into the Fold: Mother Artist Identity, which examines artist-parent identity through lens and performance-based works, was the first of its kind offered at a major photographic institution.
Currently a faculty member at the International Center of Photography, Lesly leads critique groups at CPW and La Luz while working as an independent cultural producer, delivering seminars, lectures, and curated panels for educational institutions, nonprofits, and corporate clients. For over 14 years, she operated Fiber Ink Studio, providing printing services for emerging and established artists and institutions worldwide including MoMa, Jeu de Paume, Paris, SFMOMA, Gagosian Gallery, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her technical expertise spans silver gelatin, analog Type-C, and wide-format pigment printing. These days, she prints exclusively for the Estate of Nona Faustine and a small handful of other artists / institutions. Lesly lives in Beacon, New York with her family on a mini homestead that includes honeybees.
