Artist Talk - Gabriela Bulisova

Every time I have an opportunity to talk with Gabriella, it makes me feel worse about not taking her photo journalism class last spring. I found the work that she presented on displaced female refugees in Iraq and recent female parolees in D.C. to be extremely moving and visually fascinating. It is refreshing and very important to hear about how the lives of the citizens of Iraq have been devastated by the war; we hear very little about the war in Iraq, and what we do is usually about American casualties. This project helps to drive home the point that as tragic as American losses are in a war, occupied civilians pay a far larger price. It succeeded in making me very angry because between the people in this project and the financial crisis that the war is causing domestically, I can see that the war only serves the interest of a few wealthy individuals and is destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of people. One of the things I was most interested in during the talk and through speaking individually with her was the slideshow she presented on recently paroled women in D.C. We talked at length about the increasing demand in the photojournalism world for short videos to accompany a photo essay, brought about by the high quality video that new DSLR’s shoot. She seemed really eager for criticism on the slideshow, but I wasn’t comfortable giving any because I don’t know her well and I felt that the technical problems in the video were far outweighed by the power and the content of her project. I came to realize quite quickly that video, despite popular opinion and my own interest, isn’t really a substitution for photos. There are so many moments in her photographs that I feel would most likely be missed if she were trying to shoot a video, and there are many little moments that just probably wouldn’t have the same power in a several second long shot as they do in one photographic image. I think there is also something to be said about the fact that one can linger on a photo for as long as they like, which is not possible with a video.