Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Widening the Lens with Lesly Deschler Canossi
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, August 19th, at 7 pm EDT
Lesly Deschler Canossi writes Widening the Lens, a Substack offering accessible pieces on photography and visual culture. Her writing has been a lighthouse for many of us at Kinship as we navigate the complicated, painful questions of this moment: What role can photography play? Where has the medium gone wrong? And most importantly, how can beauty and art become acts of care?
Lesly first joined Kinship in 2023, when she spoke about her curatorial and photographic work on Women Picturing Revolution. Now we're gathering with her again for an informal conversation about her latest project: writing on visual culture and photography's uneasy relationship to our synthetic-image era.
This is for anyone who relies on images to communicate and wants sharper tools for seeing critically: educators, journalists, marketers, advocates. As Lesly puts it, the real question isn't whether AI has destroyed our trust in images. It's whether we were ever asking the right questions of them to begin with.
This is research in progress, and your thoughts and pushback will shape it. The conversation belongs to all of us.
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.
