Jane Kramer – författare

Stephen Shore is a pioneering photographer and influential teacher. From Galilee to the Negev is an intimate portrait of a multi-faceted place, exploring the landscape of Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank; its complexities and its contradictions. Shore travelled the length and breadth of the region, questioning and revealing through his camera lens. His visual inquiry explores the landscape itself and the people who live in it – the daily lives and the narratives that combine to create this fascinating place – at once beautiful and ugly, safe and hostile. A selection of texts by a diverse range of writers – who have each selected one photograph as a spring board – will be interspersed amongst the photographs, offering a gathering of voices and perspectives.

A powerful and haunting visual record, Stephen Shore's portraits highlight the resilience and hope of Ukraine's Holocaust survivors.Stephen Shore, one of the most influential photographers living today, traveled to the Ukraine in 2012 and again in 2013, just prior to the current political upheaval, to visit 35 survivors, most of whom are women. In the photographs of the survivors and their homes, Shore visually explores their collective experience as seen through quotidian details, and leaves open the question as to how the history of the Holocaust informs the viewer's reception of the portraits.The book's 200 digital color photographs are organized to create intimate portraits of their individual and collective experiences whilst maintaining the unsentimental formal order of his photography.An essay by Jane Kramer, who has written The New Yorker's Letter from Europe since 1981, will situate the survivors and their stories in the historical context of Ukraine's modern history with a particular emphasis in the place of Jews within that history.An important cultural document, Survivors in Ukraine sits between the traditions of the diaristic colour photobook that Shore himself pioneered with Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (2005), and that of the 'concerned' photographer using the camera as witness to conflict and other historic events.

Whose Art Is It? is the story of sculptor John Ahearn, a white artist in a black and Hispanic neighborhood of the South Bronx, and of the people he cast for a series of public sculptures commissioned for an intersection outside a police station. Jane Kramer, telling this story, raises one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we live in a society we share with people who are, often by their own definitions, "different?" Ahearn’s subjects were "not the best of the neighborhood." They were a junkie, a hustler, and a street kid. Their images sparked a controversy throughout the community-and New York itself-over issues of white representations of people of color and the appropriateness of particular images as civic art. The sculptures, cast in bronze and painted, were up for only five days before Ahearn removed them. This compelling narrative raises questions about community and public art policies, about stereotypes and multiculturalism. With wit, drama, sympathy, and circumspection, Kramer draws the reader into the multicultural debate, challenging our assumptions about art, image, and their relation to community. Her portrait of the South Bronx takes the argument to its grass roots-provocative, surprising in its contradictions and complexities and not at all easy to resolve.Accompanied by an introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson exploring the issues of artistic freedom, "political correctness," and multiculturalism, Whose Art Is It? is a lively and accessible introduction to the ongoing debate on representation and private expression in the public sphere.