Ed Grazda and Wesaam Al-Badry

Friday, March 10th, 2017 7:30 PM PST
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133

This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute

About Ed Grazda:

Born in Flushing, Queens, Edward Grazda studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. During the 1970s he photographed in Latin America. Since 1980 he has photographed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of “Afghanistan Diary 1992-2000” (PowerHouse Books, 2000) and “Afghanistan 1980-1989” (DerAlltag, 1990). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Double Take and Granta and is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MOMA among others. He has received grants from The New York Foundation For The Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow four times. “NY Masjid: The Mosques of New York” with text by Jerrilynn Dodds and photographs by Edward Grazda was published by PowerHouse Books in May 2002. Ed continued to photograph in Afghanistan until 2004, and has photographed in Oman (2005-2006).  “A Last Glance: Trading Posts of the Four Corners” was published by PowerHouse books in the Fall of 2015.

In 2009, with Jeff Ladd and Valerie Sonnenthal, Ed founded Errata Editions – a publishing company dedicated to making important rare photo books accessible with its Books on Books series. As of 2014, Errata Editions is part of The Errata Foundation, whose mission is to to bring a wider awareness of photography through our publications and create new dialogues and education surrounding great photographic bookworks.

About Wesaam Al-Badry:

Wesaam Al-Badry was born in 1984 in Nasiriyah, Iraq.  At the outset of what became known as the Gulf War, Al-Badry’s mother fled on foot with her five children, including his 3-day-old sister, as artillery shells fell around them. After hiking all night, sometimes through knee-deep mud, they arrived at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia.

In 1994, Al-Badry and his family were relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska after spending 4 ½ years in a refugee camp. As a young man growing up in middle America, Wesaam could not help but note the disconnect between what he had witnessed in Iraq and the refugee camps, and his new reality.  As result of bearing witness to the aftermath of the Iraq-Iran war that shaped the human condition into paranoia and distrust, his first hand experiences living through Desert Storm and refugee camps, Wesaam’s work focuses on the dispossessed, the alienated and human dignity.

Al-Badry has been a contract photographer for CNN and Al-Jazeera America. His photographs have been published internationally, including campaigns for UNHCR and ACLU.   While his work mainly focuses on photo reportage and documentary, he also uses multi-media art to challenge and investigate social norms. Al-Badry currently resides in San Francisco, CA where he is pursuing his BFA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).