First Panel: Images of War // Jenifer Fenton moderator
John Durham Peters: María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Film and Media Studies Yale University
Fred Ritchin: Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photograph
David Hume Kennerly: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographer
Second Panel: Politics and Other Images // Marta Figlerowicz moderator
Holly Rushmeier: Computer Scientist and Professor at Yale University
Charles Bakaly: Senior Counselor and Lead of Edelman Litigation Communications Practice
Joe Lockhart: NFL Executive Vice President of Communications
John Durham Peters
John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is an interdisciplinary media historian and theorist with allied interests in cultural and intellectual history, anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, sound studies, and the history of science and technology. He received a BA and MA from Utah and a PhD from Stanford. He arrived at Yale in 2017 after three decades in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), all from the University of Chicago Press, a co-editor of two volumes, and author of over a hundred articles, essays, chapters, and reviews. He received NEH, Fulbright, and Helsingin Sanomat Fellowships. He has lectured or taught in over twenty countries, including extended visits from a half a year or more in England, Finland, Greece, and the Netherlands. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. He has advised or co-advised over thirty doctoral dissertations, and won awards for undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Fred Ritchin
Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the School at the International Center of Photography. Previously he was professor of Photography and Imaging (1991-2014) at New York University, where he co-founded the Photography and Human Rights program and taught courses on the future of imaging and on new media strategies in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Earlier Ritchin was picture editor of the New York Times Magazine, and later co-founded and directed PixelPress, an online publication and collaborator on humanitarian initiatives that worked with organizations such as UNICEF, WHO, Crimes of War, the Rwanda Project, and UNFPA on initiatives such as one to end polio globally and another to advance the UN’s millennium development goals.
In 1990 Ritchin wrote the first book on photography’s transition to digital, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, as well as in 2008 After Photography and in 2013 Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen. He has curated many exhibitions including “Bending the Frame,” on alternative media strategies for social change, “An Uncertain Grace: The Photographs of Sebastião Salgado,” and “Contemporary Latin American Photographers.”
In 1994-95 he created the first multimedia version of the New York Times, and in 1996 he conceived and edited the hypertext documentary website “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace” for the Times, nominated for a Pulitzer prize in public service. More recently he has created the “Four Corners Project” to provide context and ethical grounding for the photograph online.
He teaches courses on Image-Based Strategies for Human Rights, and Photography and Social Justice. Ritchin is also a member of the first mixed-gender class to graduate Yale College.
David Hume Kennerly
Kennerly won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for a portfolio of his photos from the Vietnam War, the Ali-Frazier fight, refugees from East Pakistan in India, and combat in Cambodia. Two years later, at age 27, he was appointed President Gerald R. Ford’s personal photographer. Kennerly was named, “One of the 100 Most Important People in Photography,” by American Photo Magazine.
He served as contributing editor for Newsweek for more than a decade, and a contributing photographer for Time, Life, and George magazines. Kennerly has published several books of his work, Shooter, Photo Op, Seinoff: The Final Days of Seinfeld, Photo du Jour, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, and David Hume Kennerly On the iPhone. He covered the 2016 presidential campaign for CNN, and was a major contributor to their book, Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything. His portrait of the new president is on the cover.
Kennerly works extensively in commercial and advertising photography. He has a longstanding relationship with Bank of America, with additional clients The Home Depot, Girl Scouts of America, eBay, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Vital Voices, the Points of Light Foundation and many others. Kennerly’s most published photographs may be those appearing on the millions of current Girl Scout cookie boxes.
He also maintains a busy appearance and speaking schedule, including on-air commentary, corporate keynotes, academic lecturing, and speeches for professional organizations, conferences and panels.
Kennerly’s work has been exhibited and collected by museums, corporate entities and individuals around the world.
He won the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award, for his coverage of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Fireside Summit,” in Geneva in 1985. In 2015 he was recipient of the prestigious Lucie Award honoring the greatest achievement in photojournalism.
Kennerly is a Canon Explorer of Light, one of an elite group of photographers sponsored by Canon.
Holly Rushmeier
Holly Rushmeier is a professor in the Yale Department of Computer Science. Her research interests include shape and appearance capture, applications of perception in computer graphics, modeling material appearance and developing computational tools for cultural heritage.
Holly Rushmeier received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1977, 1986 and 1988 respectively. Between receiving the BS and returning to graduate school in 1983 she worked as an engineer at the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company and at Washington Natural Gas Company (now a part of Puget Sound Energy). In 1988 she joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at Georgia Tech. While there she conducted sponsored research in the area of computer graphics image synthesis and taught classes heat transfer and numerical methods at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. At the end of 1991 Holly Rushmeier joined the computing and mathematics staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, focusing on scientific data visualization.
From 1996 to early 2004 Rushmeier was a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. At IBM she worked on a variety of data visualization problems in applications ranging from engineering to finance. She also worked in the area of acquisition of data required for generating realistic computer graphics models, including a project to create a digital model of Michelangelo’s Florence Pieta, and the development of a scanning system to capture shape and appearance data for presenting Egyptian cultural artifacts on the World Wide Web.
Rushmeier was Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 1996-99 and co-EiC of Computer Graphics Forum (2010-2014). She has also served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. She currently serves the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, ACM Transactions on Graphics, the Visual Computer and Computers and Graphics. In 1996 she served as the papers chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, in 1998,2004 and 2005 as the papers co-chair for the IEEE Visualization conference and in 2000 as the papers co-chair for the Eurographics Rendering Workshop. She has also served in numerous program committees including multiple years on the committees for SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualization, Eurographics, Eurographics Rendering Workshop/Symposium, and Graphics Interface.
Rushmeier is a fellow of the ACM and of the Eurographics Association. She has lectured at many meetings and academic institutions, including invited keynote presentations at international meetings (Eurographics Rendering Workshop 94, 3DIM 01 , Eurographics Conference 2001 and 2012, Pacific Graphics 2010, SCCG 2013, CGI 2014, CAA 2015 and VISAPP 2017.) She has spoken at and/or organized many tutorials and panels at the SIGGRAPH and IEEE Visualization conferences. Rushmeier served as chair of the Computer Science Department, July 2011- July 2014.
Charles Bakaly
A strategic communications counselor who has served as a former government official and lawyer, Charles applies his more than 35 years of experience to help clients navigate enterprise, reputation and legal risks to make good decisions in a complex external environment. The work done by Charles and his team at Edelman has won several prestigious industry awards. In 2016, the communications campaign surrounding GE’s labor contract negotiations won PRWeek’s Internal Communications Campaign of the Year. In 2011, the campaign to free a young woman imprisoned in Iran was awarded the PRSA Silver Anvil for Public Affairs (Association/Non-Profit Organization Category), PRWeek’s Public Affairs Campaign of the Year Award and PRWeek’s Crisis/Issues Management Campaign of the Year Award. Charles has been a featured speaker and panelist on multiple industry programs and events to discuss strategic communications and reputation management challenges.
Joe Lockhart
On Joe Lockhart’s first day as chief spokesman and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, the House Judiciary Committee recommended that the President be impeached. Over the ensuing months, as Congress debated the President’s fate, Lockhart impressed observers with his steady and forthright handling of often contentious, twice-daily press briefings. Long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas called Lockhart “a straight shooter,” and “one of the best it’s been my honor to work with.” Susan Page at USA Today found him “direct, well-informed and trusted.”
Lockhart handled the two-pronged challenge of managing a major crisis while continuing to tell the positive story of the administration with a widely-admired, easy-going confidence, and by March of 1999, after only six months with Joe at the podium, President Clinton’s approval rating had risen dramatically. Lockhart had helped the President not merely withstand a historic public relations crisis, but emerge from it more popular than ever.
“If Joe Lockhart knows anything,” said former CBS White House correspondent Peter Maer, “it’s how to control a narrative.”
Lockhart developed his knack for steering the conversation during his early career as an award-winning journalist, political strategist and public-relations consultant. A graduate of Georgetown University, he held posts as an Assignment Editor at ABC News, a Deputy Assignment Manager for CNN, and a foreign producer reporting on the Gulf War for Skye News. He served as a press secretary for the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, an aide to Senator Paul Simon, a senior advisor to the John Kerry campaign, and an Executive Vice President at Bozell Sawyer Miller, where he advised a range of high-profile corporations and institutions on media relations and political strategy.
Lockhart brought his signature talents to bear again when he left the White House to launch the Glover Park Group, a Washington, DC communications strategy firm. As Founding Partner and Managing Director, Lockhart embedded his instinct for storytelling into the company’s DNA, and GPG quickly grew into an industry powerhouse. The firm has earned a reputation for providing its wide range of corporate and non-profit clients (including Microsoft, Visa and the National Football League) with deft and agile crisis management, astute public affairs, policy, advertising and marketing counsel, and cutting-edge opinion research.
In 2011 Lockhart was named Vice-President of Global Communications at Facebook, just as the rapidly-expanding enterprise was preparing to go public. There, he quickly helped the company mitigate initial public backlash to its IPO, take ownership of its story and aggressively refortify its brand. His work at Facebook solidified Lockhart’s own reputation for visionary management, and in 2013 he returned to the Glover Park Group, where that vision paid immediate dividends, in the form of a major expansion and move to a new headquarters.
Lockhart’s reputation for tirelessly proactive client service also continued to grow while at GPG, as he spearheaded the National Football League’s response to a series of public challenges. He launched a forceful counteroffensive to criticism by the New York Times of the league’s concussion studies, and was instrumental in helping the NFL institute its new comprehensive and broadly-admired personal conduct policy. In 2016 the NFL named Lockhart Executive Vice-President overseeing Communications, Government Affairs, Social Responsibility and Philanthropy.
The story of Joe Lockhart’s career, unsurprisingly, reads like the many stories he’s helped shape over the years for his clients: a progression of accomplishment in a variety of fields, guided by ambitious creative vision, seasoned judgment and a steady hand.