Salon #57—Accra Shepp

Join us for an in-person salon with photographer Accra Shepp discussing his new photobook, Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice (Convoke, 2022)

Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice (Convoke, 2022), Accra Shepp’s first monograph, brings together two bodies of socially engaged photographic portraiture that document New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020. Working in the style of August Sander with a large-format camera and black-and-white film, Shepp pictures New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest. Both unplanned and highly organized, as well as independent and unified, Shepp’s images address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have come to define the American political vernacular. Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the Constitution’s fair protection provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, and suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.

Accra Shepp was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan amid the Black Power movement and the cultural change of the 60s. He is a photo-based artist whose work explores our relationship with the natural environment. Shepp’s images have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other institutions. His writings have appeared in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books and the artist’s book Atlas. Shepp’s Windbook, an artist’s-book installation, which explored ethnicity and national identity, was a year-long project where the book was outside, exposed to the elements with only the wind to turn its pages. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Wellesley, and Bowdoin, and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts.