One of numerous synthetic human portraits generated via styleGAN 2 AI
Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School. He is author of several books on the future of imaging and has curated numerous exhibitions. He was was a professor at New York University in the Department of Photography & Imaging as well as in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
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Speaker
Fred Ritchin
Fred Ritchin
International Center of Photography (ICP) School
Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School. Previously Ritchin had founded the Documentary Photography and Visual Journalism Program at the ICP School and directed it from 1983–86. He was appointed Dean in 2014 and Dean Emeritus in 2017. Immediately prior to joining ICP, Ritchin was professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1991–2014, where he co-directed the NYU/Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights educational program. He has been picture editor of the New York Times Magazine (1978–82) and executive editor of Camera Arts magazine (1982–83). In 1999 he co-founded and directed PixelPress, an online publication and a collaborator on human rights initiatives with organizations such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, Rotary International, Crimes of War, and UNFPA.
Ritchin has written and lectured internationally about the challenges and possibilities of the digital media revolution. He has published three books on the future of imaging: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990); After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008); and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013). In 2016 he co-authored with Carole Naggar the Magnum Photobook: The Catalogue Raisonné.He is also the force behind the website thefifthcorner.org, is meant to provide ideas and support for a concerted effort to innovate image-based media in ways that will help to more deeply comprehend the world and ourselves. It is based upon an understanding that the media paradigm must shift, and do so intelligently, in order to be relevant in a world in which image, fact, and even reality have dramatically different meanings today.
Ritchen has been curator of numerous exhibitions on subjects ranging from Latin American photography to alternative image strategies for social change. He created the first multimedia version of the New York Times in 1994–95, and the website “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace” that Ritchin made with photographer Gilles Peress for the New York Times in 1996. It was subsequently nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. More recently he created the Four Corners Project, an innovative strategy to provide more context and ethical grounding for the photograph online, which is being implemented as part of a collaboration among the World Press Photo Foundation, the Open Lab at Newcastle University, and ICP.
In 2012 he was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Argentinian Documentary Photography Festival in Tucumán, and in 2017 he received the John Long Ethics Award from the National Press Photographers Association.