Ithaca College

On Wednesday, March 29, photographer Jonathan Moller will speak about his work currently on display in the Handwerker Gallery. The lecture will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Textor 103.

In addition, Moller will hold a workshop, "The Blending of Activism and Art" at the Handwerker Gallery at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 30.

The talk and workshop are held in conjunction with "Refugees Even After Death: A Quest for Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation," a traveling photography exhibition that portrays the exhumations of clandestine cemeteries in Guatemala.

Moller’s work reveals the tragic history of Guatemala from the early 1980s to the present. Within the context of a thirty-six year civil war, state security forces carried out repression and genocide, murdering over 200,000 people--many of whom were missing until clandestine cemeteries were discovered containing their remains. Efforts on the part of organizations and dedicated individuals in the search for justice, truth, and reconciliation have continued to be subject to state impunity and human right violations.

Moller has spent seven of the past eleven years in Central America, beginning in 1991 when he worked in Nicaragua with a group of Salvadorans from Radio Venceremos to create the traveling exhibition El Salvador in the Eye of the Beholder. Since then Moller has lived primarily in Guatemala, where in 1993, he began work with two different human rights organizations supporting populations uprooted by the civil war. For six months in 2000-2001, he was staff photographer on a Guatemalan forensic anthropology team documenting exhumations of clandestine cemeteries. As a member of the Foreign Press Club of Guatemala, since 1994 Moller has worked as a part-time freelance photographer in Guatemala and El Salvador.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1963, Moller is a fine art/documentary photographer and human rights activist. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received a BFA from Tufts University in 1990.

These events are co-sponsored by the Handwerker Gallery, Amnesty International, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Department of Cinema and Photography, Buzzsaw Haircut, and the Student Government Association.

For more information please contact Cheryl Kramer, Handwerker Gallery Director, at 274-3548.