Photographer and author Chester Higgins was born in Alabama in 1946, and was formally educated at Tuskegee University, graduating in 1970. Experiences with his family’s church community, as well as with college campus student protest, were formative in developing the direction Higgins’ artistic practice.

Higgins’ oeuvre portrays the dignity of the African American and African diasporic communities, and this work has brought Higgins all over the world, and to Africa in particular, many times. He worked as a staff photographer for The New York Times from 1975 until 2014, and is the author of several publications, including Black Woman (1970); Drums of Life (1974); Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994); Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000); and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004). 

Higgins’ work has been the subject of many international exhibitions, and is held in notable collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Higgins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Click HERE to see his recent feature in the New Yorker.

In the long-term photographic project Sacred Nile Chester Higgins illustrates how faith migrated up and down the River Nile from Ethiopia to Egypt, leaving vestige of ancient practice in today’s worship. This visual portrayal of faith reexamines our spiritual beginnings. Recently published, this book is available for purchase on sacrednile.com.

David Hilliard‘s large-scale, multi-paneled, color photographs present complex narratives exploring a range of themes and situations, from quiet moments of contemplation to scenes of heightened drama. Documenting his life and the lives of those around him, each work comprises a number of images that employ slightly different focal points, offering multiple perspectives of a single scene. Hilliard takes the personal and familiar and manipulates them to provide a commentary on larger issues such as masculinity, coming of age, sexuality, and spirituality; striking a balance between autobiography and fiction.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Hilliard lives and works in Boston. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1992, and his MFA from Yale University in 1994. His work has been exhibited in numerous institutions including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Kemper Art Museum, St Louis; Miami Art Museum; Addison Museum of American Art, Andover; Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Hilliard’s work is represented in many public collections including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Hilliard was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and he was awarded the Bok Center Award for Excellence in Teaching by Harvard University in 2012. David Hilliard has been a visiting lecturer at numerous schools, including Harvard University; Dartmouth College; Art Institute of Boston; and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. 

“For years I have been actively documenting my life and the lives of those around me, recording events and attempting to create order in a sometimes chaotic world. While my photographs focus on the personal, the familiar and the simply ordinary, the work strikes a balance between autobiography and fiction. Within the photographs physical distance is often manipulated to represent emotional distance. The casual glances people share can take on a deeper significance, and what initially appears subjective and intimate is quite often a commentary on the larger contours of life.

For me, the construction of panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images, acts as a visual language. Focal planes shift, panel by panel. This sequencing of photographs and shifting of focal planes allows me the luxury of guiding the viewer across the photograph, directing their eye; an effect which could not be achieved through a single image.

I continually aspire to represent the spaces we inhabit, relationships we create, and the objects with which we surround ourselves. I hope the messages the photographs deliver speak to the personal as well as the universal experience. I find the enduring power and the sheer ability of a photograph to express a thought, a moment, or an idea, to be the most powerful expression of myself, both as an artist, and as an individual.”

Rania Matar is a Guggenheim 2018 Fellow. She was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar’s cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative inform her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. She works both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from, in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality all within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2021, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide.

Rania Matar is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and regularly offers workshops, talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad.

Margaret Mitchell is a Scottish portrait and documentary photographer living in Glasgow,
Scotland. Her projects range from exploring communities and children’s worlds through to long-term projects on social environment, opportunity and inequality. Her work explores the intricacies and complexities of people’s lives with a particular emphasis on place and belonging. Responsibility, dialogue and collaboration are key components in her approach in working with people.
Mitchell’s work often represents children and young people – those in the midst of establishing a sense of self, transforming from one state to another: child to youth to adult. Her multi award-winning series “In This Place” involved working with her extended family and connecting their personal circumstances with political systems, specifically their experiences of cycles of inequality over the past three decades. This work can be seen in her book ‘Passage’ which was published by Bluecoat Press in 2021. Her ongoing work is supported by Creative Scotland and explores further issues around sense of place, working in depth with people with lived experience of homelessness.

Mitchell studied at Edinburgh Napier University (1994) and Edinburgh College of Art (2000). Work has been exhibited widely including at the National Portrait Gallery, London; FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby; Festival Circulation(s), Paris; Somerset House, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow. She is the recipient of a number of awards including within the Sony World Photography Awards and The Royal Photographic Society’s IPE160. Her work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the National Galleries of Scotland and the Martin Parr Foundation. Alongside working on personal projects, recent clients include the Guardian, Telegraph Magazine and Shelter Scotland.