In PPI#3, Hewitt attempts to come to terms with both the teaching and the unlearning of photographs through an examination of reportage photography, portraiture, and conceptual art. Through a staging of and search for mediated sites of resistance, this process expands on how a public might collectively reconcile grief and images of trauma. In an effort to redress these issues through public dialogue, Hewitt organized two pivotal conversations over the course of 2020, one with artist, author, and scholar Deborah Willis; and the other with author, curator, filmmaker and theorist of photography and visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. By presenting a range of conceptual and historical strategies over the course of the issue, Hewitt finds ways to address images, moving with agency to reclaim power in spaces that attempt to arbitrate critique and exhibit care for the lives of people and the afterlives of their images.PPI#3 originated in fall 2019 with TEACHING PHOTOGRAPHS, a symposium co-organized by Shannon Ebner and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Leslie Hewitt organized this issue as a “postscript” to the symposium, responding in and out of time with the fraught and divisive events of 2020 in the foreground, middle ground, and background of her field of vision.
