Artist Statement:
Kashmir Cross Culture is a landscape and documentary multi-media project, “that seeks to create visual connections of a decades long conflict through a collaboration of my photography and that of Kashmiri photographer Yasir Iqbal. A personal narrative overlays a mix of styles and imagery: these include travelogue video clips, a Bollywood film shot in Kashmir in 1975, and anonymous TV footage.
The stunning beauty of the landscape in Kashmir, known as a paradise on earth, will be contrasted by the massive, violent protests for independence from India that the Kashmiri photojournalists document regularly.
My photographs were made during three trips from 2007- 2009, and the recent images include urban/rural portraits of Kashmiris in moments of their everyday lives.”
Biography:
Nancy Siesel is a Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist whose compassionate eye and concerned photography have graced the pages of newspapers and magazines since 1990.
As a former staff photographer for The New York Times, her deep interest in the transformative power of documentary photography was sparked, while working on a project at the School of Visual Arts on a former classmate who worked in Times Square as a topless dancer, and later succumbed to AIDS by her 25 birthday. The project, entitled Solitary Dancer, was a personally painful and cathartic undertaking that spanned seven years. The experience of working on multi-year projects continued through her college years and subsequent professional life.
Nancy has twice been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts. In 2008 she was awarded her first Brooklyn Arts Council grant for a project entitled View in a Room, an exhibition of large scale landscape photographs in patient rooms in the critical care unit of Woodhull Hospital. She was also awarded a grant from the Puffin Foundation for this project.
In 2009, she was awarded grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council for Kashmir Cross Culture, and in 2010 for the project Last Rites, Brooklyn.
Nancy Siesel
