Art and Architecture: Urban Cave | Andrea Star Reese, Alison Morley | An Artist Dialogue Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Photographer Andrea Star Reese and Alison Morley, Director of Photography and Photojournalism at the International Center of Photography (ICP), who served as photo editor for Urban Cave discuss the development of this long-term and challenging project as they share images from the book with the audience. 

Urban Cave originally began as a photo essay taking  viewers into the life of a community of unsheltered homeless people who lived for more than a decade in a train tunnel under the streets of Harlem. It is a story about the resilience and humanity of people who live unsheltered on the other side of conventional society. The images are in response to the beauty of a place, a people, and the dignity, determination, and perseverance reflected in their culture.

Urban Cave filled  with Reese's color photographs and an introduction by Alison Morley is published FotoEvidence Press, a publisher of documentary photography focused on social justice and human rights. 

FotoEvidence Press was founded to support documentary photographers working on long-term projects that focus on human rights and social justice and to bring to light work that might otherwise not find publication. Every year, an international jury grants the FotoEvidence Book Award to one photographer whose project demonstrates courage and commitment in the pursuit of human rights and social justice and the selected project is published in a high quality, hardbound book.

Copies of Urban Cave are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

Andrea Star Reese is a photojournalist/documentary photographer based in New York currently working on long term projects in South East Asia and the United States. In 2013, Disorder a documentary reportage on conditions faced by Indonesians suffering from mental illness and undiagnosed mental disorders was exhibited and screened at Visa Pour L’Image  in Perpignan, France and Angkor Photo Festival. Initially published in 2013 on Lightbox at Time.com and featured earlier as a work in progress on New York Times Lens Blog, the essay documented psycho-socially disabled men and women living in homes, shelters, schools and hospitals. Disorder was a 2014 finalist for the Manual Rivera-Ortiz Grant and included in American Photography 28: Best Pictures from 2011. The Urban Cave, a multi-year project on long-term unsheltered men and women living in makeshift housing in New York City was first exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image in 2010, where it was a Visa d’Or Feature nominee. The project received the 2014 David Pike Award for Excellence in Journalism Photography, and Best Social Documentary from The 2009 New York Photo Festival. The Urban Cave was awarded second place by the  2014 Kontinent Awards and, in 2011, it received a second place Fotovisura Award. Urban Cave was a finalist for the 2013 FotoEvidence Book Award and the 2011 POYI: World Understanding Award among other recognitions. Most recently Urban Cave was included in traveling exhibitions for FotoEvidence and ReGeneration 2 and exhibited at Theory of the Clouds Gallery, Kobe, Japan, and the 2013 Athens Photo Festival.  Disorder and The Urban Cave have been published internationally. Andrea Star Reese in on the staff at the International Center of Photography School and a tutor at the Angkor Photo Festival Workshop, She was a 2010 Fellow in Photography with the New York Foundation for the Arts and an Aperture reGeneration2 photographer. 

Alison Morley is a photo editor and educator. Alison has been the Chair of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the International Center of Photography in New York since 2000, where she teaches and oversees an adjunct faculty of more than 60 working photographers and professionals.  As a photo editor, she has been the photography director of The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Audubon, Life, Civilization, Esquire, Mirabella, Elle, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Currently, she works as a consultant for photographers, agencies and magazines. She has edited several major monographs and has curated touring exhibitions for Blood and Honey: A Yugoslavian War Journal and The Road to Kabul, both by Ron Haviv; I Am Rich Potosi: The Mountain That Eats Men by Stephen Ferry; and Soviets: Pictures From the End of The U.S.S.R. by Shepard Sherbell. Her awards for photo editing include American Photography and the Society of Publication Design and Communication Arts. She is on the nominating committee for Visa Pour L’image in France and World Press Photos in The Netherlands. In Los Angeles, she ran her own studio doing editorial portraiture for magazines such as Shape, Redbook, Rollingstone, Cosmopolitan, Film Comment, and Los Angeles Magazine. Her photographs have been published in several books including Backstory: Screenwriters of The Golden Age, edited by Patrick McGilligan. She has written on photography for magazines and books and has lectured and led workshops in the United States as well as in Bangladesh, Bosnia, China, France, Hungary, Philippines and Uganda. She attended Simmons College, majoring in Communications and earned a B.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1978. 

Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.

Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.

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