Join us on Tuesday, September 8, 12:00-1:00 pm CST for online presentations of Arko Datto and Michael Robinson Chávez’s extraordinary work followed by an engaging conversation led by Natan Dvir, Managing Director of Education at HCP.
RSVP is required via this link.
What does it mean to tell a story through photographs today? In an era saturated with images, where documentary photographs circulate alongside social media, artificial intelligence, surveillance technologies, and constantly shifting forms of visual communication, the relationship between photography, truth, and storytelling has become increasingly complex. The practices of Arko Datto and Michael Robinson Chávez offer two distinct approaches to navigating this terrain.
How might experimentation, personal experience, and journalistic observation offer different ways of approaching the realities we seek to understand? Bringing together two photographers with distinguished, expansive personal practices, this event will examine how contemporary practitioners construct narratives through images, negotiate the ethics and responsibilities of representation, and respond to a world in which the photograph is no longer simply a window into reality, but an increasingly complex form of storytelling.
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Arko Datto is a contemporary international artist based in India. His varied work spans forced migration, techno-fascism, digital surveillance, disappearing islands, and nocturnal geographies, forming interconnected inquiries into the existential pressures shaping the contemporary moment. His projects unfold over several years, allowing him to build layered, immersive, and complex narrative worlds. Datto’s long-term personal projects and commissions have been published in TIME, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker, among others.
Michael Robinson Chávez, a Peruvian American and California native now based in Spain, has established himself as an acclaimed visual journalist. Over 15 years at The Washington Post, and prior stints at The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, he has cultivated a deep understanding of photography and its power to tell compelling stories. Chávez's accolades include two Pulitzer Prizes, including one in 2020 for The Washington Post's exploration of climate change. He's a three-time Robert F. Kennedy Award winner and was named Pictures of the Year International's Photographer of the Year in 2019.