UPDATE: 100 ATTENDEES, LIMITED DUE TO COVID SAFETY.

We are requiring all attendees to be fully vaccinated at this event.
Please bring photo-proof of vaccination, preferably a SMART Health Card.

This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute. Students (from any school) are always welcome to attend PhotoAlliance lectures for free. Please present your student ID at the door.

PhotoAlliance believes in an accessible, inclusive and supportive arts community. The income we receive from ticket sales offsets our costs and allows us to pay artists for their work. If you are unable to afford the admission cost of a PhotoAlliance event, we welcome you to join our production team and attend for free, more information HERE.

All photos © Ken Light

Ken Light is a photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture. He got his start in 1969 photographing for alternative newspapers and magazines which were widely published in posters, books and hundreds of periodicals.

He has exhibited internationally in over 225 one-person and group shows, including one person shows at the International Center for Photography, Oakland Museum of California, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, Visual Studies Workshop, Visa pour L’image Perpignan (France), International Fotoage (Germany), S.E. Museum of Photography, Yerba Buena Center S.F. and Smith College. His work is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Helmut Gernsheim Collection and many others including private collections.

He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Photographers Fellowships, a NEA survey and publication grant, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation as well as grants from the Soros Open Society Institute, the American Film Institute, the California Arts Commission, International Fund for Concerned Photography, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Max and the Anna Levinson Foundation as well as the Johnathan Logan Family Foundation. Other awards include the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award.

He is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and was the 2012 Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also taught workshops at many school and photo festivals including at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop, S.F. Art Institute and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He was a founder of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which awarded grants to photographers worldwide, as well a founder of Fotovision a non-profit documentary photo organization which was based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Culminating from Prof. Ken Light’s fifty years as a social documentary photographer, his newly released monograph Course of the Empire, is his witness of the American social landscape of the last decade. Portraying a decade of mounting tension in a polarized America, from Wall Street to the rural heartland the book is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time.

Course of the Empire
by Ken Light

Published by Steidl, 2021.
300 pages, 208 images.
27 x 28 cm.

All photos © Jessica Chen

Photographer Jessica Chen is based in San Francisco and New York. Her award winning photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous galleries and online exhibitions including the Praxis Photographic Arts Center, the Vermont Center for Photography, RayKo Photo Center, Los Angeles Center of Photography, PH21 Gallery (Budapest) and publications such as Analog Forever Magazine, Luupe Blog, and the Humble Arts Foundation.

Jessica is a member of the American Photographic Artists (APA), the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP), the International Street Photographers Group, Women In Street, and the East Bay Photo Collective. She earned a B.A. in Studio Art and a B.S. in Environmental Design and Visual Communication at the University of California, Davis, and an M.F.A. in documentary and narrative film from Parsons at The New School, New York.

In 2017, Jessica was awarded the Emerging Award by American Photographic Artists (APA). Jessica is a teaching artist at the Josephine Herrick Project in New York City.