Lecture with Michelle Dunn Marsh

3:00pm, Saturday, May 7

Michelle Dunn Marsh’s lecture Holding Our Histories lecture will draw from her recently-published memoir Seeing Being Seen: A Personal History of Photography. Through a selection of snapshots, as well as some of the photographs she lives with by influential photographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Carrie Mae Weems, Sylvia Plachy, Bruce Davidson, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Lisa Kereszi, David Hilliard, An-My Lê, Endia Beal, and others) Michelle will speak to early life influences, her introduction to, and love for, photography as an art form, her relationship to the visual book, and the layers of her multi-faceted professional career engaging audiences with significant photographers and photography.

Holding Our Histories

With the transparency, conviction, and humor that she believes a creative life necessitates, she will share some of the joys and challenges of earning a living as a cultural worker; address her desire to continue producing affordable books of visual fidelity by an eclectic and representative selection of American artists; and make her case for the urgent need for diverse representation in advocate and gatekeeper roles as we form the histories of the future.

Through an introduction to her simple method for reading photographs, she will highlight why she believes that the stimulation of conscious seeing through significant photographs is essential to the evolution of American culture.

About Michelle Dunn Marsh

Michelle Dunn Marsh is an American of Indo-Burmese and Irish descent; she holds dual citizenship with Ireland. She conceived, and with Steve McIntyre co-founded Minor Matters, a collaborative publishing platform, in 2013. They launched Book Pitch, an online consulting service for aspiring visual authors, in 2020.

Dunn Marsh led Photographic Center Northwest from 2013–2019, spent fifteen years in various roles with the nonprofit publisher Aperture Foundation, New York; was senior editor of art and design at Chronicle Books in San Francisco; and has worked in a freelance capacity with over twenty publishers and cultural institutions on books or public programming.