The Graying Pandemic formal portrait series on Aging with HIV was selected as one of two projects chosen for the short list of this year’s Getty Creative Grants. Congrats to our co-exceptionals, and to the winners – all around deserving and inspiring projects!

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Twenty years ago, on June 6th, 1993, a dilapidated freighter carrying a human cargo of 286 Chinese migrants ran aground off the New York Rockaway peninsula after a hazardous four months sea voyage. It was the largest group of undocumented immigrants ever apprehended while trying to cross into the United States, and the televised rescue effort and widely published images of emaciated men huddled on a NYC beach covered in blue blankets became an enduring symbol of a new kind of immigration crisis, where concerns over border security met with the perception of rampant human smuggling operations run by Asian gangs.

A new body of work in progress, this series of diptychs and portraits sets out to convey the experiences of some of the men who agreed to pay exorbitant amounts of money for a smuggler’s passage to a new life in the United States, while placing those individual experiences into their historical context. The arrival of the Golden Venture occurred just as changes in U.S. immigration policy were imminent, ending an era of relative openness and reform, and heralding the beginning of large scale, indefinite detention for immigration infractions. View the rest of this entry »

My video piece on surrogacy in India is presented as part of Browse Berlin Fotofestival‘s multimedia line-up in Berlin this month.