Gayle x Gayle: A father-daughter journey into living while Black through photojournalism
Wednesday November 3, 4-5pm
WebEx Link (new link, changed from Zoom)
Introduction by Adrienne Lee Atterberry, PhD, PRODIG Fellow, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY New Paltz
Recording of the event is at this link.
Please read the chapter The Promise from C Wright Mills’ book, The Sociological Imagination to prepare.
Professor Gayle invites us to consider the following questions during her presentation:
What is it that you see in a photo the resonates with you?
Do you connect more with an image if you can see yourself or your representation through it?
What if the only images available to you only told part of the story?
So where is the rest of the picture?
My associate, the news media, is a twisted, two-faced character that I have a strong love/hate relationship with. I love it because I am a storyteller. I hate it because it doesn’t always tell “my stories” or tell them well. And for this reason, I stay. I stay to tell the stories, I stay to teach the stories and I certainly stay to train the upcoming journalists how to tell better stories.
When I look at the work that my father did and the work I do now as a photojournalist and scholar of visual credibility in the news media, I wonder about fate, because this is what I am meant to do.
I’ll start you on this journey with me as I delve into a documentation of Black life over six decades by two different photographers who are related but never had the chance to work alongside each other. Now that work will be studied and researched alongside one another. There are recurring themes that one will see in the images. Themes that mainstream media overlooked for one reason or another. But if we look at this project’s images, where does Sociological Imagination fit? And when talking about reality, whose reality is it?
Let’s spend an afternoon engaging in this conversation from a mass communications, fine art, and sociological point of view.
About Gina Gayle, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Visual and Multimedia Storytelling, Emerson College
Dr. Gina Gayle is a photojournalist, educator, and researcher earning her doctorate in Mass Communications from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University with research interests in media credibility, innovation, new technologies, the future of photojournalism, and digital media entrepreneurship. Her coursework has included traditional research methods along with ethnography, experimental research methods, Q Methodology, as well as applied research in new media, data visualization, data analytics, AR/VR/360 storytelling and drone journalism.
Dr. Gayle has created curriculum in multimedia storytelling at the University of Southern Mississippi and media entrepreneurship and innovation for the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Newhouse School. Dr. Gayle has taught multimedia, photojournalism, entrepreneurship, and media management courses. Her professional work has taken her across the United States as well as to Cuba and Italy while previously working in New York City with clients including numerous new organizations, papers, and magazines.
Dr. Gayle received recognition for her work with awards and fellowships including the Hearst Newspaper Journalism Fellowship and the NABJ Gulf Coast Fellowship allowing her to continue working on personal projects such as her New Orleans Zulu project, about the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Other projects include the Picture Me project, telling the stories of children in foster care waiting for their forever families in Mississippi, The Black on Black Love Project, and the one closest to her heart, the autoethnographic and multimedia project that involves the photography collection of her late father, Mr. James F. Gayle, the first Black photographer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
This event is hosted by Eddy at New Paltz and co-sponsored by the Photography Program / Art Department, the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism Program, the Digital Media and Journalism Department, The Sociology Department, and the Faculty Development Center.