Chester Higgins Jr. Photograph by Sanviki Chapman.

Chester Higgins Jr., a photographer for The New York Times whose images have appeared in exhibitions all over the world, visits Bates to give a talk titled Dancing with My Spirit at 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, in Room G65 of Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is sponsored by the Learning Associates Program and the programs in African American and American cultural studies. For more information, please call 207-786-8296.

“With the camera I embrace the spirit that is the essence of all existence,” Higgins has said. His mission is to embrace, to reaffirm and to challenge. Higgins’ images resonate with a spiritual echo that maintains the image and frees it from the constraints of time.

Much of Higgins’ imagery is inspired by issues of identity. Over the past five decades, he has produced a visual collection of compelling imagery reflecting a sensitive and in-depth diary of his explorations of the human Diaspora and his concern with his own humanity.

Higgins has worked as a New York Times photographer since 1975 and has exhibited in museums throughout the world. His one-man exhibitions have appeared at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of African Art, the Schomburg Center, the New-York Historical Society and Musée Dapper, a museum of African art in Paris.

Higgins has published several photo collections including Black Woman, Drums of Life: A Photographic Essay on the Black Man in America, Some Time Ago: A Historical Portrait of Black America (1850-1950), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, and Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging, as well as a memoir, 2004′s Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey.

His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has been published in numerous compilations and publications such as Newsweek, Fortune, Look, Essence and Life.

Photographer Dawoud Bey.

A photographer renowned for his ability to capture the individual reality overlooked in conventional portrayals of teenagers and other stereotyped groups, Dawoud Bey discusses his work at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 15, in the Benjamin Mays Center at Bates College, 95 Russell St.

Sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Education and the Bates College Museum of Art, this event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8303 or eburke@bates.edu.

“Dawoud is a stunning artist whose photography seeks to challenge our assumptions and bridge our differences,” says Roland Davis, OIE director. “He’s a truth teller, but he also demands that we look closely at our preconceptions about people, because often there’s so much more than what we see.”

The OIE supports the advancement of diversity and inclusion at Bates, and Bey is the office’s inaugural Visiting Artist and Scholar. “The arts can be a really powerful voice in our discussions of difference,” says Davis. “My hope with the Visiting Artist and Scholar program is to make sure that some aspect of the OIE’s work is embedded in the arts.”

Bey, who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, has taken to heart an activist slogan of that seminal era: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” As he told the online magazine OnMilwaukee.com in 2009, “I always wanted my photographs to challenge the status quo, to contest the kinds of images that existed in popular culture, that staked out my own sense of who and what the subject matter was and why [it's] important.”

Bey has evolved a collaborative approach to his work that actively engages his subjects, as well as participating museums and other cultural institutions, and seeks to foster a sense of community. For 20 years, in his project Class Pictures, he has made large-format portraits of high-school students that, presented with essays by the teenagers themselves, seek to create a new understanding of American diversity and of the youth experience.

“This work is profoundly important and will be of particular interest to the Lewiston-Auburn community because our youth are as complex and multifaceted as any,” says the OIE’s Davis. “Understanding Dawoud’s work may help all of us come to understand young people that much better.”

Representing students from across the country, an exhibition based on Class Pictures toured nationally in 2011, and the book Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey was published by Aperture in 2007.

Bey’s talk is part of a three-day residency at Bates. From Monday, Feb. 13, through Feb. 15, he’ll  meet with students and faculty, as well as groups off campus, to discuss his work and offer thoughts about ways his projects can build community.

Bey began his photography career in 1975 with the series Harlem, USA, a response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Harlem on My Mind exhibition and, he has written, to “my own family’s history in the Harlem community.” The series became the subject of a 1979 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Bey’s work has been shown and collected by major U.S. and international museums including The Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery in London; New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which organized a mid-career survey, “Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995″ that toured nationally and in Europe.

Alongside his work as a photographer, Bey has published critical essays on contemporary art, including groundbreaking pieces on African American artists. He has also taught at a variety of institutions, and since 1998 has been a professor of art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.

Bey received a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art.

Learn more about Dawoud Bey.

"Josephine," an image by award-winning photographer Alexandra Strada '10.

Titled “Josephine,” the photograph above appears on a website announcing Alexandra Strada ’10 as winner of the 2011 InFocus Photography Award.

Brooklyn resident Strada has shown her work in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Iceland and the Gerald Peters Galleries in New York City and Santa Fe, N.M. At that last location, in a 2011 exhibit whose 29 artists also included Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol and other large names, “Josephine” was called the show’s most intriguing image by a reviewer for a statewide arts magazine.

Part of a series shot over three years at Clover Manor, an Auburn nursing home, “Josephine” (the subject’s family name remains confidential to protect her privacy) was also among Strada images in the 2010 Senior Exhibition at Bates.

Alex Strada '10, photographed by Jolie Ruben.

“I photographed the objects that residents brought with them to what’s potentially the last room they’ll ever live in,” says Strada, whose day job is as associate photo editor for Time Out New York. “I was so surprised by what I found, and so excited by these little details that see only so many eyes.”

As a photographer, Strada is drawn to the out-of-the-way and unfamiliar. (It’s a tendency that extends to her choice of medium — she shoots on film.) With the still image, “you can contemplate for so long something that’s simple and small, and that holds so much weight. In everyday life, it’s really hard to do that,” she says.

“Photography is such an important tool for slowing down and looking around, and thinking about our existence.”

The Senior Exhibition culminates the senior thesis process for art and visual culture majors in the studio art track (Strada undertook both the studio and art history tracks), and she calls the thesis “one of the most important experiences that I’ve ever had.”

Student artists spend their last year at Bates building a cohesive body of work for the exhibition, much as they would as professional artists. Faculty advisers Pamela Johnson and Robert Feintuch, says Strada, “made my body of work flourish and develop over the year.”

But she also credits Elke Morris, who teaches photography, with crucial encouragement early in her Bates career. “She gave me an exhibition in Chase Hall Gallery,” Strada says. “To get that kind of recognition at that time boosted my confidence so much. At first I wasn’t going to be an art major, but her instruction and her support really made me want to pursue it.”

The InFocus Award was established in 2008 by Ontario resident Michelle Collins to support emerging photographers. “I’ve always appreciated art,” says Collins, “and I think it’s important to invest in what you love. It’s especially important to invest in young people.”

The award includes $1,000 (U.S.), which Strada will put toward a new medium-format Mimiya camera.

Davis’ black and white photographs of the human form explore light and shadow, selective focus and the use of a mirror to expand perspective. Her fascination with abstraction moved her to focus on the simple features of the body — the line of a fingertip or the arch of a back. “My photographs are a culminating body of work that provokes intrigue in abstract features and the natural beauty of the human body,” she says.

Inspired by photojournalism, Benedict takes photos to show human tragedy, human triumph and human ingenuity. Through the use of computer manipulation, framing and a special lens, he broadens the photojournalistic approach to capture “not just the recordable moment but also the surrounding environment.”

It’s Dec. 16, and they’re coming. Scores of visitors stream into the Manhattan headquarters of Christie’s, the purveyor of highbrow art and culture, for the two-day sale Icons of Glamour and Style: The Constantiner Collection.

The 320 photographs on the block represent the “most important collection of fashion photography that we know of,” says Joshua Holdeman ’93, international director of 20th-century art at Christie’s.

Despite the collection’s significance, Holdeman and his Christie’s team at 20 Rockefeller Center are concerned about the sale. The economy is imploding, and buyers are skittish. (Later in the winter, Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s would both announce layoffs.) Will these fashion and celebrity images, made by photographic legends such as Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, actually sell?

At least today, not to worry. During an electric first night, Newton’s life-size, four-panel gelatin silver print of Vogue runway models, Sie Kommen, Paris (Naked and Dressed), fetches $662,500. The final sale total is $7,721,875.

• View the sale results from Icons of Glamour and Style

Holdeman was an art major at Bates — he studied painting as well as art history — then left for New York, where he’s worked his way up the gallery and auction ladder while trying retain to a certain equilibrium. “The world is a crazy place,” he says, so he’s guided by principals he saw in action daily at Bates: “There’s no substitute for hard work and ethical, straightforward behavior.”

Holdeman represents clients in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S., helping them develop and manage their collections. Managing client expectations is a constant challenge because — understandably — “many people believe their objects are worth more than they are.” His best clients, he says, “let me do my job.”

On this night in New York, Holdeman is constantly on the phone — sometimes two phones — working with clients, assessing the dynamic situation. Every client bid reflects a certain level of trust in Holdeman’s assessment of a dynamic situation. It’s these relationships that give Holdeman great professional pleasure.

“It’s all about the people,” he says.

The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, a touring exhibition of photographs chronicling the migration of Somali refugees to Maine and other U.S. locations, opens at Bates College with events beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The 55 black-and-white images created by Somali-born photographer Abdi Roble will be exhibited at the Bates College Museum of Art through May 29. The show opens with a 5 p.m. lecture about the U.S. intervention in Somalia, followed by Roble and his collaborator in a book project speaking at 6 p.m. Both events take place in Olin’s Room 104. A reception in the museum follows at 7 p.m.

Museum admission is free. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, but is closed on major holidays.

Since the early 1990s, civil violence has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis out of that African nation. Roble, who left Somalia in 1989 and now lives in Ohio, has documented the Somali diaspora for five years.

His images trace the refugees’ long hard journey from refugee camps in Kenya to such cities as Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine. One group of photographs tracks a single family’s journey from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to California, and their subsequent resettlement in Maine.

Michael Paulovich, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Somalia with a diplomatic security team during the U.S. presence there in the early 1990s, offers the lecture “Challenges in Humanitarian Intervention: Cultural Lessons from Somalia 1992-1994″ at 5 p.m. Jan. 23. For more information, please visit the Web site.

Paulovich will be followed at 6 p.m. by Roble and writer Doug Rutledge, discussing their collaboration on the book The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, based on the images Roble is showing at Bates (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

In a 2007 Associated Press article, Roble explained the importance of capturing the refugees’ experiences while they were happening. “If you have no record, you have no history,” he said. “We lost everything. We have no museum, no galleries, no record.”

In photographing the refugees, Roble told the AP, he found himself humbled by the stories he witnessed. The images represent “classic American stories of people landing in this country. It’s exactly the same, it just happened in a different time.”

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and Arts Midwest in partnership with the Ohio Arts Council, the exhibition appeared previously in Columbus and Minneapolis.

Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1964 and came to the United States in 1989. He has freelanced for the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Post, and his images have appeared in Leica View magazine.

In 2003, with Rutledge and others, Roble founded the Somali Documentary Project, with the goal of photographically documenting members of the Somali diaspora while they are still engaging in the cultural practices of their homeland. For more information, see www.somaliproject.org.

Also opening at the museum on Jan. 23 is Recent Acquisitions: Collection Project III. Running through March 30, the exhibition was assembled by five Bates students invited by the museum to learn about curatorial practices. These interns created themed “cluster exhibitions” from recent museum acquisitions, exploring such ideas as gender, race, medium and provenance.

Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Amy Stacey Curtis, Louis Hine, Cindy Sherman and Bates faculty members Paul Heroux and William Pope.L.