The lecture will take place in the Screening Room at Lesley University Hall. Following the talk, we invite you to continue the conversation during a social hour at the PRC gallery from 7–8 PM, where Amani will be signing copies of his new book Invisible Sun, which will be available for purchase.

Venue : Lesley University Hall, 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Amani Willett is a Boston-based photographer whose work explores family, history, memory, and the social environment, often through the book form. His monographs Disquiet (Damiani, 2013), The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer (Overlapse, 2017), and A Parallel Road (Overlapse, 2020) were named among Photo-Eye’s “Best Books of the Year” and have been widely published and exhibited. His work appears in major collections including MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Willett is an Associate Professor of Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Invisible Sun, published by Dust Collective, is a visual meditation on survival, transformation, and memory, exploring how childhood trauma and lived experience continue to shape the present.

Announcing the Next PRC Speaker Series Event!

Join us on Thursday, February 5th at 6 PM for a talk by Rachelle Mozman Solano, held both online and in person at the Screening Room on the lower level of Lesley University Hall.

Rachelle Mozman Solano is an artist working between Brooklyn and Panamá, drawing from the histories, myths, and psychological inheritances of the Americas. Her work—deeply informed by her practice in psychoanalysis—explores identity, migration, family narratives, and the intersections of story and mythology within everyday life. Mozman Solano is the recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited at institutions including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, the National Portrait Gallery, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and others.

Event Details

Date : Thursday, February 5th, 2026
Times : In Person: Lecture 6 – 7 PM, Social Hour with the Speaker: 7-8 PM

Tickets

> Online Tickets
> In-person Tickets

Rachelle’s Work

California marks the limit of geographical progress of civilization

Child Pose

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Following the talk, we invite you to continue the conversation at the PRC gallery from 7–8 PM for a casual social hour with the artist.

Toni Pepe creates prints and three-dimensional assemblages from discarded newspaper images, family snapshots, and obsolete photographic equipment, investigating how photography shapes our understanding of time, space, and self. Her practice explores the layers of information a print conveys beyond its image—whether through the presence of text, subtle stains, or crop marks—each detail offering insight into the photograph’s journey and its significance as a physical object. More than static images, photographic prints capture and suspend our likenesses and histories, bearing the marks of time and physical interaction.

Pepe is the Chair of Photography and Associate Professor of Art at Boston University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity, the Boston Public Library, the Danforth Art Museum, the University of Oregon, Candela Books + Gallery, The Magenta Foundation, and numerous private collections. She was a resident at Frans Masereel Centrum in 2023, a MacDowell Fellow in 2024, and was recently named a Howard Foundation and Evelyn Stefansson Nef Fellow.

Pepe’s lecture will take place in Lesley’s Screening Room, located on the lower floor in Lesley University Hall. There will be signs posted throughout the first floor in University Hall to direct guests to the screening room.

Get Tickets

Please Note: The in-person portion of this lecture will take place in the Screening Room on the lower level of Lesley University Hall. Directional signage will be posted throughout the hallway, and a PRC staff member will be stationed near the stairwell to guide attendees to the Screening Room

Jessica Rinaldi is a staff photographer for The Boston Globe. In 2016 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for The Life and Times of Strider Wolf and was also named a Pulitzer Finalist in the same category for a different story that same year. Prior to joining The Boston Globe in 2013 she spent ten years as a contract photographer for Reuters based in Boston, Dallas and New York City. She has a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University.

Event Details

Date : Tuesday, November 18
Time : 6-8 PM

Online tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1645178937489?aff=oddtdtcreator

In-person tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1857673915689?aff=oddtdtcreator

Jessica’s Work

East Boston, MA – 4/28/20 – Funeral director Joe Ruggiero, the second generation to run his family’s business, and apprentice funeral director Nick Verrocchi, (R) move a casket inside a makeshift storage area. In normal times the room is used as a tribute room where families could gather, have some coffee and regroup but with a surge in COVID-19 deaths, the room had to be temporarily repurposed. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)

East Boston, Massachusetts — 8/25/2015– Raquel begins to panic as she embraces Estrella in the waiting room of her summer camp program while they wait for a councilor to arrive and open the doors. After having relapsed for less than a week Raquel had made an appointment with a Doctor to up her dose of methadone at the clinic, it was scheduled for 8:00 in Chelsea. Estrella’s camp opened at 7:30 and Raquel had done the math, if she took a cab she could make it there in time. But by 7:45 the councilor still hadn’t showed and now Raquel was in jeopardy of losing the appointment and the higher dose of methadone she needed to get back into recovery. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff Topic: 31raquel Reporter:

FOR FUTURE STORY USE ONLY – STOUGHTON, MA — JUNE 18 – Frilei Brás lingers in the doorway of the kitchen as his daughters Sarah, 9, (R) Clara, 19 (2nd from R) and his son Rafael, 5, sit with his daughter’s boyfriend and look back at him with pained expressions shortly before he will leave the house and his family for the last time in Stoughton, MA on June 18, 2025. After his last check-in with ICE, the Brazilian native without legal immigration status was told to leave the country in the next 15 days or risk arrest. He chose to deport, because he couldn’t bear the thought of attempting to stay and being forcibly removed in chains. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)

South Boston, MA – 08/20, 2013 – Nino Deler, of Boston, holds his parrot “Birdbrain” out for onlookers as his son, Nino Jr., rides his bike along the boardwalk in South Boston, Massachusetts August 20, 2013. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)

Oxford, Maine — 5/29/2015– On the night of the eviction the boys climb into a rusted Ford on the property behind the mobile home. Strider holds a broken automotive hose to his eyes like a pair of binoculars and asks, “What’s on the moon?”

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Unstable

December

Artist Biography

Amani Willett is a Boston-based photographer whose practice is driven by conceptual ideas surrounding family, history, memory, and the social environment. Working primarily with the book form, his three monographs have been published to widespread critical acclaim. Disquiet (Damiani, 2013) and The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer (Overlapse, 2017) and “A Parallel Road (Overlapse 2020)” were selected by Photo-Eye as “best books” of the year and have been highlighted in over 70 publications including Photograph Magazine, PDN,
Hyperallergic, Lensculture, New York Magazine, 1000 Words, NPR, The British Journal of Photography, Collector Daily and Buzzfeed and recommended by Todd Hido, Elisabeth Biondi (former Visuals Editor of The New Yorker), Vince Aletti and David Campany, among others.

Amani’s photographs are also featured in the books American Geography (SF Moma/Radius Books, 2021), Bystander: A History of Street Photography (2017 edition, Laurence King Publishing), Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson), New York: In Color (Abrams), and have been published widely in places including The Atlantic, American Photography, Newsweek, Harper’s, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. His work resides in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oxford University, and Harvard University, among others.

Amani completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2012 and a BA from Wesleyan University in 1997.

In addition to his artistic practice, Amani is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

This is an ONLINE presentation via Zoom

For tickets click HERE

Dudley M. Brooks is the deputy director of Photography for The Washington Post, where he manages the creative strategy and production of photo content for the Features, Local, and Sports departments. Before its discontinuance in December of 2022, he was also the photo editor of The Washington Post Magazine. Immediately prior, he was the director of Photography for the monthly magazine Ebony and senior photo editor for its weekly sister periodical Jet. These publications chronicled the African American experience for nearly eight decades and he was a member of the senior staff responsible for redefining their brand.

Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Brooks is a graduate of Morgan State University with a degree in Fine Arts. He began his journalism career in 1981 as a staff photographer for the Rockford Register Star newspaper in northern Illinois. He later joined the photography staff at The Washington Post from 1983 to 2005. Brooks was the assistant managing editor of Photography at The Baltimore Sun newspaper from 2005 to 2007 and the co-creator/director of the landmark 1992 project Songs of My People: African Americans – A Self-Portrait, a best-selling photography book, and a globally toured exhibition. The undertaking commissioned new work by 53 African-American photographers and has been widely celebrated for its fresh perspective of contemporary Black culture. In 2003 he created and co-directed Imagenes Havana, a comprehensive workshop in Havana, Cuba which included an exhibition that displayed the work of 25 international photographers, supplemented by roundtable forums.

Brooks is an active participant in several professional photography organizations and has been a presenter at Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Africa Foto Fair in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. He also served as the national chairman for the 2021 National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism contest and is a board member of the Social Documentary Network.

This event will be held In-Person and Online

In Person event location is at Lesley University, University Hall screening room, lower level, 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA

For IN-PERSON tickets click HERE

For ONLINE tickets click HERE

M. Sharkey is a photographer, filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn. QUEER KIDS, his long-term documentary project, has had solo exhibitions nationally and internationally at locations including Galerie de la Main de Fer, Perpignan; Rainbow House, Brussels; Les Rencontres d’Arles and at Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy. Sharkey’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Interview, New York magazine, The Guardian/Observer, La Repubblica, Stern and T: The New York Times Style Magazine and been included in various exhibitions at venues such as the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; and the Staten Island LGBT Community Center. In 2016, Sharkey co-founded Coffey Street Studio, a 13k sq. ft. warehouse studio located in Red Hook, Brooklyn dedicated to the development of new performance work. In 2023, Sharkey co-founded the collective, Coordinated Artists, a group of performers, writers, directors, composers, designers and cinematographers working in film, theater, performance and music

This is a HYBRID presentation: Online via Zoom, and In-Person at
Lesley University, University Hall screening room
lower level, 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge

Eugene Richards is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker who has authored numerous books. His first publication, Few Comforts or Surprises (1973), which speaks of the lives of sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta, was followed by Dorchester Days (1978), a portrait of the inner-city neighborhood where he was born. Subsequent books include Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue (1994), a study of the impact of hardcore drugs on inner city communities, and War Is Personal (2010), a documentation of the consequences of the Iraq war. Recent books include The Day I Was Born (2020), which focuses on life and protest in the racially divided Delta of Arkansas and In This Brief Life (2023), a look back at 50 years of photographic work.

Among numerous honors, Richards has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for Photographic Innovation, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for coverage of the disadvantaged.

Thank you to the Mass Cultural Council
for supporting this program.

This is a HYBRID presentation: Online via Zoom, and In-Person at
Lesley University, University Hall screening room
lower level, 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge

For IN-PERSON tickets click HERE

For ONLINE tickets click HERE

Laura McPhee’s landscape photographs made over the last decade or so in the American west provoke questions about our attitudes and beliefs about the earth we inhabit, questions sometimes environmental, sometimes cultural or geographical. Made with film and a large-format view camera, the photographs envelop time, both geologic and human. A serpentine river cuts a deep meander in the land. A gold mine on the edge of the Black Rock Desert is an incision, exposing a ruddy interior. A still-life found on slickrock in the Navajo Nation reveals fragments of human presence — machine parts, zippers, desert-varnished tin cans, a tiny plastic toy among shards of glass and rust. A meditation on our material lives and the unintended consequences of humanity’s attempts to control and manage nature, the images depict our paradoxical efforts as we come to terms with the reality of climate change and as we variously attempt to restore, protect, alter, and exploit the land.

McPhee’s work has been widely exhibited both in the United States and abroad and she has had the good fortune to be the recipient of a number of grants and residencies. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Getty Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Laura McPhee was a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she enjoyed decades teaching extraordinary students. She remains the Director of the Graduate Program in Photography at MassArt.

Thank you to the Mass Cultural Council
for supporting this program.

For ONLINE tickets click HERE

For IN-PERSON tickets click HERE

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photography, video, and writing. They received their MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, their Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University, and their BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Dugan’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of more than 50 museums, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Library of Congress.

Dugan’s monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change. Dugan’s commercial and editorial clients include the ACLU Magazine, Airbnb, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME. Dugan teaches workshops at venues including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Filter Photo in Chicago, IL. In 2015, they co-founded the Strange Fire Collective to highlight work made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists. For the 2020-2021 academic year, Dugan was the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.

“My creative practice centers around an exploration of identity—particularly gender and sexuality—through photography, video, and writing. Drawing from my experience as a queer, non-binary person, my work is motivated by an existential need to understand and express myself and to connect with others. My intention is to create work that facilitates intimacy and encourages empathy, understanding, and critical conversations about identity and contemporary social life. As I pursue these aims, I continually explore what it means to live authentically and how visual representation—particularly photographic portraiture—plays a powerful role in that process. Formally, I use a medium-format camera, natural light, and a slow working method to combine a traditional style of photographing with contemporary subject matter. My work does not attempt to provide definitive answers; rather, it invites viewers to engage with others in an intimate, meaningful way, requiring them to reflect on their own identities in the process.”

Thank you to Digital Silver Imaging (DSI) for sponsoring this program. Digital Silver Imaging (DSI) is the only lab in the world producing the DSI Digital Silver Print®.  This process allows for direct printing of B&W digital images on REAL silver gelatin, light sensitive photo paper. Digital Silver Imaging also crafts museum quality color pigment prints, as well as digitization, art reproduction and print finishing and framing services. Digital Silver Imaging has printed, framed, and delivered prints for exhibitions through out the USA and internationally to the Boston MFA, Philadelphia Art Museum, Chicago Art Institute, MOMA, Paris Photo, and the Musée de la Photographie Belgium to name only a few.