Athens, Ga. – Documentary photographer and photojournalist Kael Alford will present slides of her work and discuss her experiences as an unembedded photographer documenting the Iraq War at the University of Georgia on April 24 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 214 of the Student Learning Center. The event is sponsored by The Georgia Review, UGA’s National Magazine Award-winning quarterly journal of arts and letters, in whose pages some of Alford’s photographs and writing recently appeared.
In 2003-2004 Alford worked extensively in Iraq before, during and after the U.S.-led invasion, documenting the resulting turmoil and the rise of the Iraqi resistance. Some of Alford’s photographs were featured on the cover of the Fall 2007 issue of The Georgia Review and in a photo essay within titled “Eye Level in Iraq” (which also included images by photojournalist Thorne Anderson.) These photographs offer a view of the conflict, revealing Iraqi men, women and children living amid the threat and effects of violence.
Alford has a master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and has covered culture, politics and conflict in the Balkans and the Middle East for many U.S. and European publications, including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the New York Times and Vanity Fair. In 2005 she collaborated with Anderson and two other independent photojournalists, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Rita Leistner, to produce a book of their work, Unembedded: Four Independent Journalists on the War in Iraq (Chelsea Green Publishing), which also is a national touring exhibition. Since returning to the United States in 2005, she has been covering subjects in the American south and is working on a long-term project about coastal erosion and its impact on the landscape and cultures of the Louisiana coast.
Alford has taught photojournalism at the American University in Bulgaria and currently teaches documentary photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta.
The Georgia Review, one of the nation’s top literary magazines, has been continuously published at the University of Georgia since 1947. Among its numerous awards and honors are two National Magazine Awards-for Essays in 2007 and for Fiction in 1986-and a 2007 Governor’s Award in the Humanities. The Review was recently named a finalist for a 2008 National Magazine Award in General Excellence for issues published in 2007, including the one in which Alford’s work appears.
For further information about this event, contact Mindy Wilson at 706/ 542-0044 or mswilson@uga.edu.