With her latest project, conceptual artist and photographer Carolyn Monastra has been traveling to places where birds are in danger of habitat loss. She hopes to spur viewers to take action around climate change.

With a passing glance, the Canada jay overlooking Peyto Lake in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada, appears to be completely real—but if you hold your gaze, an unnatural outline becomes clearer, and you realize you’re looking at a facsimile. The photo below is part of a project called The Divergence of Birds, in which artist Carolyn Monastra, FCRH ’88, photographs paper cutouts of birds in their native habitats—a nod to a future in which the real birds may be forced out of those current homes.

Monastra said that the idea for the project came out of reading a 2014 National Audubon Society climate report that found that 314 North American bird species will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080—a number that increased to 389 species in a 2019 report.

Monastra, who also teaches photography at Nassau Community College, plans to photograph cutouts of each of those 389 birds for the project. Where she cannot travel to the actual habitats to shoot photos, she said, she will recreate the environment, and she’ll gradually document all the photos on the project website, along with some behind-the-scenes photos and videos of her process.

“I want people to understand that they’re cutouts from the time they come to it,” she said, “using that as a way to get them to pay attention to the birds in my photographs, see what’s happening to them, and then go outside and get engaged.”

Committing to Photography and Finding Inspiration

In the 1980s, Monastra majored in English at Fordham College at Rose Hill, where she was a member of the honors program, but she also took several photography classes at the Lincoln Center campus. One of her photography professors, Joseph Lawton, saw her talent behind the camera and encouraged her to pursue an M.F.A. after she graduated in 1988.

After several postgraduation years serving in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Santa Monica, California, and exploring a career in social work, Monastra followed Lawton’s advice. She enrolled in the M.F.A. program in photography at Yale Universityto “finally commit to being a photographer,” she said.

Once she had her master’s, she began teaching, and she has held several high school and college jobs, including a year as a photography instructor at Fordham. She has been teaching full time at Nassau Community College since 2005, all the while pursuing her own projects outside the classroom, like lovely, dark and deep, in which she turned to “the fragmentary space of dreams and my experiences with the environment to discover and create mystery in the natural world,” and The Witness Tree, which immediately preceded The Divergence of Birds and also dealt with climate change, in that case through a series of landscape images showing the effects of climate disasters.

Monastra first saw the Audubon Climate Report while working on The Witness Tree, and the wheels for a bird-centered project began turning. She thought about her own history with the animals, and she began buying books for research—books that would ultimately provide a more material kind of inspiration.

“I was really interested in how birds build their nests,” she said. “I’d never really been a birder until I started this project, but my mom always had bird feeders, so we always had birds around. I was buying all these secondhand bird books to learn about birds building their nests, and then I just started cutting them out.”

She also was reading Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? around that time, and she said that the dystopian world of the book, in which electric versions of animals are so realistic that no one can tell the difference between them and the real thing, resonated with her.

“That little part also made me think about this idea of facsimile and simulacra, and how sometimes we’re fooled by that. And in a future warming world, if we don’t protect what we have, that’s all we’ll have left.”

An Artist’s Responsibility

In addition to updating the project website on a rolling basis, Monastra has been thinking about ways to bring the project to a wider audience in various settings. In October, she had a residency at NYC Audubon’s environmental center on Governors Island, where she used the images for banners she could string throughout the center.

And much like a Postcards to Politicians project she created for The Witness Tree, in which she encouraged people to handmake postcards from her collaged images and send them to politicians to push for climate action, she would like to engage communities with The Divergence of Birds directly.

“Adopt a Bird will be something similar, using recycled materials,” she said of her next planned public project. “I’ll have all the pictures of the birds in people’s area, wherever it happens to be. There will be a pledge they’ll make, as they adopt that bird, to promote climate change legislation.”

Beyond hands-on, collaborative art, she hopes that the photos will not only get viewers interested in birds but also spur them to take action around climate change in other ways. That is, she feels, one of her guiding forces as an artist.

“I think artists do have a responsibility to use their gift to talk about these issues,” she said. “Whether it’s climate change or social justice or anything else, I think we have the ability to translate numbers and statistics into something that can move people.”

I’m 72 years old now and no longer remember exactly when I stopped being a “practicing Catholic.” As Ernest Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt, it happened gradually, then suddenly.

While at Fordham from 1965 to 1968, I learned about other religions and spiritual practices, other traditions and virgin births. My worldview simply expanded and eventually my parents’ and grandparents’ faith was no longer mine.

Or so I thought. In 1971 I began photographing, first in Brooklyn, then throughout New York City. As I published and exhibited my work in the following decades, I became increasingly aware that many of my extended projects focused on some aspect of religion. Hidden or neglected, my Catholic roots had influenced my choice of subjects.

In 2005, the Museum of Biblical Art presented 80 of my photographs in The Word on the Street. The photographs in this exhibit captured various forms of religious expression in everyday New York City life: from memorial walls with paintings of Sacred Hearts to crucifix tattoos and home altars.

When asked in a 2002 PBS interview about the distinctive essence of being an American Catholic, the priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew Greeley emphasized the power of traditional Catholic imagery. “They like the stories. Christmas, Easter, May crowning, the souls in purgatory, the saints, the angels, the mother of Jesus. These are enormously powerful religious images.”

This insight has proven especially true for me because religion was intertwined with ethnicity and geography. The flickering candles and statues of saints on my grandmother’s dresser in her Brooklyn apartment fascinated me when I was a boy. I photographed it in 1975 and 30 years later made a print of it for The Word on the Street.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I began sheltering at home in early March.  I’ve had even more time to think about how these themes have affected my work. I’ve been looking at contact sheets from the 1980s and scanning negatives I never printed. I photographed the top half of an old calendar on the wall of my Park Slope apartment in 1983.

This image of a guardian angel and two children crossing a bridge is well known and frequently reproduced. It reminds me of the schoolbooks I had as a child. A drawing in one of them depicts my guardian angel with its hands on my shoulder as I cross the street.

The website catholic.org lists 39 prayers to guardian angels. I would say them all, every day, to get my guardian angel back.

—Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72, was the staff photographer for New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development for more than 20 years. He has earned several grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for his own work documenting the urban landscape. His most recent books are B-BALL NYC (South Brooklyn Boy Publishing, 2019) and Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 (Cornell University Press, 2018).

In this video, filmed before Fordham closed its campuses and shifted to online learning, Krell builds a scene in his Bronx apartment using a fog machine, Bluetooth lights, and broken mirror shards.

“I just love creating. I love setting a scene; I love making content; I love branding, marketing, and all that goes into photography or making some sort of campaign,” Krell says in the video. “The main thing photography has taught me is to stay in the moment and just to appreciate where you are, who you’re with, and to use everything around you to the best of your ability. And I also think that’s what Gabelli has taught me.”

Now, Krell is living in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, with his parents and younger brother. But he’s still shooting pictures — just from a different perspective. 

“Father McShane loves to highlight that most of your learning at Fordham University comes from outside the classroom, and I couldn’t agree more. Now that quarantine has become my new lifestyle, both my education and my photography have shifted a lot,” Krell wrote in an email. “Recently, I have been returning to the type of art I was able to make in high school, focusing on nature with willing members of my family helping out. I was even able to take a photo using my dad as the model! Hopefully my neighbors aren’t too worried about the kid running around with orange extension cords and blue lighting every day at sunset.” 

But while the New York City parks department maintains hundreds of public courts, there has long been an ecosystem of alternative hoops in the city. These hoops—ones that reflect the history of inequity in New York, almost always lacking nets, sometimes constructed from a mix of found materials—are the focus of a new book of photography, B-BALL NYC, by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72. Selected photos from the book are also on display at the Brooklyn Arts Council in Dumbo until December 19, with viewings by appointment.

While working as a staff photographer for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Racioppo, a Sunset Park native who has previously released books of Halloween photos and Brooklyn street scenes from the 1970s and 1980s, was tasked with taking pictures of vacant land and distressed properties. It was in these areas that he began to notice a common sight: makeshift basketball hoops, attached to the sides of buildings, steel fences, trees—wherever folks could get a backboard and rim (of some sort) to stay up.

Whether born out of a lack of proximity to a playground or the need for kids to create a safe playing space as close to home as possible, these hoops represent the resourcefulness of New Yorkers who have always found a way to bring “the city game” to wherever they are.

“[It’s] a game you can play with a minimum amount of equipment,” Racioppo recently told WFUV’s George Bodarky. “All you need is a basketball and a few friends. And if you [can’t] find anyone to play with, you [can]just practice your shots.”

Along with Racioppo’s photos, taken between 1971 and 2018, B-BALL NYC features New York Times writer Dan Barry’s 2012 essay, “Hoops Spring Eternal,” and an original poem, “For Those Who Know … the Playground,” by legendary DJ, filmmaker, writer, and basketball aficionado Bobbito Garcia.

While several of the photos depict official playgrounds, the majority of them tell a story of the unconventional spaces that have served the needs of resource-strapped hoops heads over five-plus decades in New York City.

More information about B-BALL NYC can be found on Racioppo’s website.

“Here it hangs, another basketball hoop built into the brick of the city. Probably without a net. Maybe bent a little at the front of the rim. Maybe nothing more than a milk crate hammered into a plywood backboard. But it speaks to you.”

–Dan Barry, from “Hoops Spring Eternal”

“For those who didn’t have rims, who have shot on the bottom step of a fire-escape ladder or bottomless milk crate, or empty trash can … For those who know the Playground, that playground is you.”

–Bobbito Garcia, from “For Those Who Know … the Playground”

Get ready to live it up in the Boogie Down.

It’s the Bronx, a festival that celebrates art, music, food, and hustle which the city’s northernmost borough is famous for, will kick off on March 23rd at the Andrew Freedman Home. The all-day event will begin with panel discussions with Bronx influencers, including Saraciea Fennell, the founder of #TheBronxisReading, and will culminate with a night of music and performances by over two dozen artists. The festival will continue once a month from May through October.

The preview event for It’s the Bronx on Jan. 26 at the Bronx Brewery attracted hundreds of Bronx creatives, entrepreneurs, art supporters, and food and beer lovers.

“It was an amazing and overwhelming experience to perform there. To be surrounded by so many talented people from the Bronx—it felt like home,” says singer-songwriter Mati, one of the festival’s headliners.

Mati has been performing since she was 12. Her music is a combination of rhythm and blues and Bengali Lalon Geeti. “I perform in the Bronx every chance that I can get. The crowd’s energy is different from Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

“This event is all about the “come-up,” says Marco Shalma, the founder of It’s the Bronx. “We want to get local creatives in front of larger audiences, engage with them to the highest industry standards, and put them in contact with decision-makers.“

The festival will feature the Bronx’s most notable “hustlers,” like Jessica Cunnington from News12, Amaurys Grullon of Bronx Native, Dandy In the Bronx and more. The main sponsor, the Bronx Brewery, will serve local craft beer. Jibarito Shack, Empanology, No Carne, and the Uptown Vegan will dish up local cuisine.

Also featured in the day’s lineup are a DJ turntable battle and a fine art gallery exhibition showcasing the work of local Bronx photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, and painters.

Shalma and his team have donated their after-work hours in order to bring this event to the community.  “Any profits for the event will be allocated toward a stipend for the team, a donation to the Andrew Freedman Home and the Bronx Creative Alliance, a non-for-profit we have been working to put together, to give the creatives in the community legal, financial, and admin support.”

This festival is just the start, says Shalma, who was one of the co-founders behind the Bronx Night Market. “The team and I like to dream big, wanting to get the entire city behind the idea of supporting up-and-comers. In three to four years? A qualifier event in each borough leading to a citywide weekend celebrating hustle.”

In 2017, the Press relocated downtown to the Lincoln Center campus, closer to the publishing community. It moved into the space once occupied by Fordham’s International Institute of Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA), which in turn took over the Press’s quirky abode, Canisius Hall, just outside the gate of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Both parties say the swap was a perfect exchange.

Canisius Hall is akin to a renovated walkup apartment building whose windows overlook Clavius Way. The IIHA gained conference rooms and offices where international conference calls from trouble spots around the globe can be fielded and then discussed in an academic setting. Much of the building’s serene vibe is offset by the very serious nature of the crises in the communities IIHA serves.

In the new Canisius Gallery, opened in September 2017, images of refugees from a past art show that hang in the hallways, as well as the images from the current show, stand in stark contrast to bucolic Rose Hill. And that’s pretty much the point, said Brendan Cahill, executive director of IIHA.

“My hope for this gallery really is to challenge the Fordham community, the Bronx community, and the New York Community to engage with international humanitarian and social justice issues,” he said.

He said the small space can comfortably display about two dozen photographs. The idea is not to have large shows, but to hold small, high-quality photography exhibits with a focus specific enough that the shows won’t be dissolved into New York’s huge photography scene. Only two or three shows will be held a year.

Cahill has reached out to Fordham’s photographers, Joe Lawton, associate professor, and Stephen Apicella-Hitchcock, artist in residence, in the Department of Visual Arts. With their input, IIHA mounted shows that were documentary in nature yet diverse in style.

The gallery’s Spring 2018 show focused on the sex trafficking crisis by showing the work of photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg. Cahill said Nickelsberg took a holistic approach that included images of the clients, the judges, the police, and the people that were trafficked. That particular show culminated with programming that included a panel discussion featuring speakers from the New York Police Department, various NGOs, and activists.

Cahill noted that Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history, identified the artist in the current show, Defiant Spirits: Fernando Brito’s Sinaloa.

The show features images from the photographer Fernando Brito’s home state of Sinaloa in Mexico, an area known more by outsiders for its drug cartels than for Jesús Malverde, a 19th-century Robin Hood character who purportedly stole from the rich and gave to the area’s indigenous poor. While Malverde was never made a saint by the Catholic Church, the residents of Sinaloa hold a large festival celebrating his memory on May 3 of each year.

Framed by the media as a celebration for narcos, people involved in the illegal drug trade, the festival through Brito’s lens becomes an homage to the hard-working people of his home state. That’s not to say that Brito turns a blind eye to the violence and horrors that the drug cartels bring to the region; One photo depicts a man shot dead on the street with the skull of a cow placed atop his head and a grapefruit on his stomach in a vulgar appropriation of spiritual imagery.

But it’s the images of the area’s residents that occupy a bulk of the show and the lion’s share of Brito’s attention. Images of baptisms, veneration of the Virgin Mary, women at prayer, and the slaughtering of cows bring daily life to the forefront, usurping the violence. A series of straightforward portraits of townspeople posing in front of the altar at their local church looking straight into the camera anchors the show in humanity.

Cahill said that the current political demonization of the people of Mexico is an effort to desensitize U.S. citizens of their humanity. He noted that images of the people in the photos are not those of refugees trying to gain access to the U.S., but of ordinary citizens at home in Mexico. He said this show speaks to the overall mission of IIHA in “that images, that art, and that culture are a part of a celebration of the diversity of life.”

“Very often in the [humanitarian]aid world there’s a power imbalance of those who are vulnerable and those who are trying to give assistance,” he said. “Often, you lose sight that the person who is waiting to be clothed, to be housed, to be fed, was once a teacher, or was a physician. But they can just look like someone with outstretched hands. We always need to be reminded of that humanity in who we’re trying to help, because one day that could be us.”

The show runs through Feb. 28, when it will be sent on loan for an exhibition at Yale University. The gallery’s next show will feature Syrian photojournalist Bassam Khabieh in an exhibition on loan from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

“I did it because I liked the feel of it,” he says. “There was something about having a camera that made me think, made me feel more alert and more aware of my environment.”

Few days made Racioppo feel more alert than Halloween.

As a kid, he’d go trick-or-treating with cousins and friends, and they’d have make-believe fights with shaving cream and “chalk bags”—old socks filled with pieces of chalk crushed to dust. By nightfall, they’d head indoors to bob for apples, carve jack-o’-lanterns, and enjoy the sweet loot they’d foraged from friendly neighbors. “I loved the activity, the crazy costumes, the theatricality of it,” he says.

By the mid-’70s, he was in his 20s, a recent Fordham graduate working at a high-end Manhattan photo studio. He’d long since stopped trick-or-treating, but the spirit of the holiday still called to him.

“I started leaving work early on Halloween to get back to Brooklyn. I photographed kids from 3 o’clock, when they got out of school, until it got too dark to shoot with available light,” he says, noting that he’d start near Park Slope and wander south to Sunset Park. “That first year, I came out of my house and the kids charged me—they ran up to me full speed for me to take their picture.”

“It became a yearly thing,” he says, “so from ’74 to ’78, I had all these fabulous photographs. And the kids and costumes were terrific. There’s the classics—the ghosts, vampires, angels. And every year there’s a movie that’s the big movie. One year it’s Planet of the Apes, then it’s Jaws, then Star Wars, and sometimes those cultural costumes would linger a year or two. But they have a shelf life—I mean, when you look back and see the Fonz costumes. These days, who even knows who the Fonz was?”

Ever since 1974, Racioppo says he’s had an easy rapport with the neighborhood kids, who took to calling him “Picture Man,” a nickname he says he took as a great compliment.

In October 1979, the Village Voice featured eight of Racioppo’s Halloween images, and the following year, Scribner’s published Halloween, his first book.

“That was really my first notch up,” he says, noting that it helped launch his decades-long career in photography. From the late 1980s until 2011, he was a staff photographer for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and he has earned several grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for his own work documenting the urban landscape.

“Part of what I do is about stuff disappearing,” he once told The New York Times. That’s an explicit theme of his latest book, Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983, published last month by Cornell University Press.

The book highlights working-class families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes in the book’s preface. “Slowly but surely, the residential ‘gold rush’ expanded south from Park Slope … toward Green-Wood Cemetery,” driving up rents and home prices, and driving out many working-class families.

Brooklyn Before features a handful of the Halloween photos that helped launch Racioppo’s career. Today, he lives in the Rockaways, where he has continued photographing trick-or-treaters on Halloween. This year, however, he says he may head back to Brooklyn to meet up with his grandsons in Park Slope, where, although the times have changed, the spirit of the holiday is still strong.

“They’re 8 and 6 years old now. They won’t just get a chalk bag and run around till dark by themselves. They’ll go to supervised play or an after-school Halloween celebration,” he says, like the annual children’s parade. “Halloween is always fun. There are so many great things about it.”

Following the development of the automatic pinsetter in the 1950s, bowling became a cultural phenomenon in America.

“People would refer to it as the blue-collar country club,” said senior Emma DiMarco, who is studying visual arts with a concentration in photography at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Last summer, DiMarco traveled to the Midwest and Great Lakes region to document the decline of bowling alleys in the Rust Belt. Her photographs will be on view at Ildiko Butler Gallery at the Lincoln Center campus from April 25 through May 7.

Approximately 12,000 bowling centers were built in “mostly blue-collar, urban areas of the United States” in the mid-1960’s, according to The Gale Group, Inc., a research and educational publishing company.

By 2011, however, the number of bowling centers dropped to about 5,160.

“[Bowling alleys] are disappearing, along with manufacturing. At the same time, bowling is being repurposed to serve a different class of Americans in trendy bars and restaurants,” said DiMarco.

“I’m fascinated by American culture and how that changes overtime. Bowling alleys are not something that would be considered timeless. They represent something of the past.”

DiMarco received a research grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill to fund her month-long road trip to several states, including Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

“When I started going to bowling alleys and photographing them, I realized that many of them were run-down,” she recalled, adding that some bowling alleys had shuttered or were struggling to stay afloat while a small percentage were experiencing an evolution of the popular American pastime.

In one town in Indiana, DiMarco spoke with a mechanic of 20 years who shared that bowling was no longer a popular activity in his community. But in the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, she met one of the owners of JC’s New York Pizzeria Department who had a different experience. According to DiMarco, the pizzeria/sports bar, which includes amenities such as pool tables and an arcade, saw an uptick in customers when it opened a three-lane bowling alley.

“They had just built the lanes and he said it was booked every single weekend,” she said.

Though DiMarco’s photo project centers on bowling alleys in Middle America, bowling became a “smaller part of a larger story.”

“There’s something to be said about photographers that are creating work that has depth behind it. I want people to look at my work, and say, ‘Wow, this exists.’ I want people to see parts of America that they haven’t seen before.”

Sheehan received a residency fellowship that is allowing her to do infrared and other photographic processes on a tall ship in the northern latitudes, just off the coast of Svalbard, Norway.

The residency, sponsored by The Farm Foundation, will bring Sheehan together with scholars, scientists, choreographers,composers, sound designers, a cinematographer, and a children’s book author to collaborate on projects relating to the environment and climate change.

“So much of what we experience in contemporary life is filtered and fleeting,” said Sheehan. “I will use my camera as a drawing tool to look for patterns of light and ephemeral, spectacular moments in landscape,” she said. “I plan to work with micro lenses and infrared photography to show the environment in an engaging, and unfamiliar way”.

For Sheehan, who views her artist’s methods in almost a scientific manner, and whose primary focus is the environment, the collaboration is a perfect fit.

“When I start a project, I like to work in an experimental way with materials, opening the work to new outcomes,” she said. “I’m very excited to be in the arctic, where I’ll have time to push new ideas, collaborate, and collect visual data to use back in the studio.”

Sheehan said she primarily thinks of herself as “someone who draws” but she incorporates “all levels of visual information.” That includes photography, painting, charts, maps, and anything that helps convey “the collaged, compressed experience of contemporary life.”

Focusing on content that highlights the rapidly disappearing ice and snow, Sheehan said she’ll be using photo techniques in a “painterly way,” playing with light, color, and texture. The use of infrared can transform a landscape that is green to appear as if it is pink or white, thus returning a verdant landscape to the color of the ice and snow that once covered it.

Aside from landscapes, Sheehan said she’ll also be making photograms of ice shadows using cyanotype, a blue-toned, early photographic printing process used frequently in the 20^th century. As the process uses iron oxide, out of concern for the environment she won’t be developing the prints until she returns to her Brooklyn studio. As with the infrared, the cyanotype photos will also highlight global warming.

“Rather than showing ice melting, they’ll show you absence,” she said. “There are lots of mythic stories of shadows being the soul of something.”

Sheehan expects the overall theme of the work to be about “light, shadow, and ghosts,” themes which she says will allow her to play with the nearly 24 hours of light a day at the Arctic Circle this time of year.

“I use my camera as a drawing tool. I look for patterns of light and ephemeral moments in landscape,” she said. “I hope to bring that sensibility to the arctic.”

After a 30-year hiatus, he returned to document a stunning reversal of history—a Jewish cultural renaissance emerging and expanding into the mainstream of 21st-century society. He will document this revival in a photographic exhibit, Roots, Resilience, Renewal.

Wednesday, May 3
6 p.m.
School of Law Room 1-01
150 W. 62nd St., Lincoln Center Campus

The show draws upon Fishman’s first monograph, Polish Jews: The Final Chapter, (McGraw-Hill, 1977), and represents a project spanning 40 years—from the near-demise to the transformative rebirth of Polish Jewry.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, said Fishman’s early images, which are considered rare and historically unique, chronicle an era long left to memory, and serve as notable counterpoints to his latest work, which illuminates and defines the myriad faces and facets of a Jewish ‘return’ to identity today.

“This is a story that offers us a rare perspective into an exceptional moment in time, one that the passing of four decades has radically changed,” she said.

A four-time winner of the World Press Photo Foundation Medal, Fishman has published photographs on the covers of Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, The London Sunday Times, and The Economist. His photos are represented in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Center for Creative Photography, Hogan Jazz Archive, Studio Museum in Harlem, POLIN: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the United Nations.

The event is jointly sponsored by Fordham’s Jewish Studies program; the Derfner Judaica Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

For more information, contact [email protected] or visit fordham.edu/jewishstudies.