Join internationally renowned photographer Mitch Epstein and writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams for an hour-long Zoom conversation moderated by FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator Kevin Moore. The year 2020 will live in infamy as a time of particularly acute and complex crises, with acrimonious politics layered upon social unrest and environmental affliction. Epstein and Williams, both Guggenheim Fellows, will discuss their explorations in photography, writing, and advocacy, and examine the myriad transgressions against American lands and the peoples struggling to survive there.

Mitch Epstein is a pioneer of 1970s color photography who has captured America’s landscape and psyche for fifty years. In his latest photographic series, Property Rights, he questions who owns the land, by whose authority, and with what rights. He began the series in 2017 at Standing Rock, where thousands protested the Dakota Access Pipeline on Sioux land, and he has continued his exploration into America’s abuses of power this year with photographs of Southern Confederate monuments and Black Lives Matter protests.

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer who speaks out on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she demonstrates through her work how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. She is the author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing (2020) and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change.