The Male Gazed

Amy Elkins, Paul Mpagi Sepuya & Jessica Yatrofsky in conversation
Moderated by Allen Frame

Sunday, May 15, 6pm
This CCNY Conversations Event is part of the New York Photo Festival

Join Amy Elkins, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Jessica Yatrofsky and moderator Allen Frame in a discussion with artists who explore the male figure.

About the speakers

Amy Elkins was born in Venice Beach, CA and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Her photographs explore notions of vulnerability, identity and transitory states. The series Wallflower investigates and confronts some of the cultural grounds underlying gender. Elkins’ newest series, Black is the Day, Black is the Night, conceptually explores masculinity and identity through correspondence with men serving life and death-row sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the US. Elkins was recently awarded the Lightwork Artist-in-Residence prize, and her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at Carnegie Art Museum, Kunsthalle wien in Vienna, Austria, The PIP International Photo Festival in Pingyao, China, Gallery Gagopa in Masan, South Korea, Gallery Elsa in Busan, South Korea, Barbara Walters Gallery, National Arts Club, Tina Kim Gallery and Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (1982, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Basel, Sydney, Toronto, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. His work has been featured and reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Interview, Capricious, V, Paper, and BUTT, among other publications. Recent exhibitions include 30 Seconds Off an Inch at The Studio Museum in Harlem and 50 Artists Photograph the Future at Higher Pictures and recent awards include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency (2009-2010) and Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2010), and currently Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2010-2011).

Jessica Yatrofsky is a New York–based photographer, known for her film and photographic work with male subjects. She is the founder of iheartboy.com, a website dedicated to picturing young men in sweetly provocative ways, and is a regular contributor to eastvillageboys.com. Yatrofsky’s artwork also includes live performances as well as films that explore beauty, sexual politics, and perception. She received an MFA from Parsons The New School and has just published her first monograph titled, I Heart Boy, with Powerhouse Books. Selected works from I Heart Boy are currently on display during the NYPF at 111 Front Street.

Allen Frame lives in New York, where he teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and the International Center of Photography. His book Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001. He is represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he had solo shows in 2005 and 2009. He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis in 1996 and In This Place at Art in General in 2004; Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery in 2006; and Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: Experimental 70’s Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro and Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series at the Camera Club of New York.