Masterclass Lecture
Masterclass Lecture
Image-based Strategies for Social Change
How have photographers, both in the past and the present, produced imagery that has been able to provoke societies to focus on a variety of issues — war, health, famine, social justice — to facilitate social change? What was the impact of the photographs and other related media, and how were they produced and presented? How has this been accomplished in print media — magazines, newspaper, books, zines, exhibitions — and how is it being done differently with digital media? Is it now possible, for example, to highlight the photographer as a subjective observer, to increase collaboration with those depicted, and in doing so engage the reader in new and more nuanced ways? What are some of the newest experimental strategies that can be explored?
Fred Ritchin has spent the past half-century working as a writer, editor, educator, curator, and software developer. He is the dean emeritus of the School at the International Center of Photography; was professor of Photography & Imaging at New York University where he co-founded the Photography and Human Rights program in collaboration with Susan Meiselas and the Magnum Foundation; was picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and executive editor of Camera Arts magazine; and has written four books on the future of imaging, including most recently The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI (Thames & Hudson, 2025) and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, which was recently re-printed by Aperture.
He also curated the first mid-life retrospective of the work of Sebastião Salgado at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; conceived and edited the first non-linear online documentary, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” with photographer Gilles Peress (nominated by the New York Times for the Pulitzer Prize in public service), and curated the first exhibition of contemporary Latin American photography in the United States, as well as exhibitions at the United Nations. He also created the first multimedia version of the New York Times newspaper, and conceived of the Four Corners Project, an available open-source software to increase the credibility of the photograph.
Ritchin has taught and lectured worldwide, including in Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, England, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Uruguay, and the United States. He also writes a column on Substack, “Notes of a MetaPhotographer.” Ritchin lives in New York and Paris.
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