Landslides: A conversation about grief and photography with Geoffrey Biddle and Marvin Heiferman

How do photographs help shape the legacies of those whose who have died? How do photographs help the living envision, cope with, and understand loss?

Photographer Geoffrey Biddle joins curator/writer Marvin Heiferman for a conversation moderated by curator Marina Chao examining intimacy, illness, family and loss through writing and photography.

Biddle will discuss his current exhibition, curated by Chao, and accompanying photo/text memoir, Rock in a Landslide. They present an intimate and candid portrait of life with his late wife, sculptor Mary Ann Unger. Biddle traces their charged partnership and parallel creative practice through falling in love, parenting their daughter Eve, and Unger’s thirteen-year battle with cancer, which ended with her death in 1998.

Heiferman will present and discuss his ongoing Instagram project (@whywelook) about the sudden, COVID-related death of his husband—curator and cultural historian Maurice Berger—in March 2020 and its aftershocks. Heiferman represents and explores both the vulnerable state and continually recalibrated experience of mourning in the personal photographs and captions he posts daily on Instagram which have sparked a communal dialogue about dealing with and picturing love and loss.