Join Lynn Johnson for a conversation on the selfie and its place in an increasingly interconnected world on April 26 at the Mitchell Park Community Center in Palo Alto. The talk will reflect on the question: how does our selfie obsession connect us with one another as we are challenged to hold our ground in empathy, tolerance and inclusion? This talk will be moderated by Brian Storm and is part of the Palto Alto Photo Gallery Lecture Series, an organization that aims to foster conversations in visual storytelling. Lynn Johnson is a photojournalist and visual storyteller. As a regular contributor to National Geographic, Johnson is known for finding beauty and meaning in difficult subjects—threatened languages, zoonotic disease, rape in the military ranks, the brain, the centrality of water in village life. She collaborates with the people she portrays to honor their visions as well as her own, and she is not afraid to…

The Open Society Documentary Photography Project is soliciting submissions for a new joint exhibition and grant opportunity that engages with ideas of resistance and embraces the role and agency of artists themselves in shaping our societies. Selected projects will be exhibited in the next installment of our ongoing Moving Walls exhibition series, opening in October 2017 at the Open Society Foundations–New York. Selected artists will also receive a grant of $20,000–$30,000 to support ongoing or future work on these themes. OSF is seeking photo-based artists whose goal is to resist, question, and/or affirm, not merely to illustrate or document negative impacts as a neutral observer. Proposals should engage with topics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation/expression, religion, nationality, and immigration status from a variety of perspectives. We encourage applicants to interpret these themes broadly. The project welcomes a wide range of photo- and image-based approaches, including documentary photography, conceptual documentary, archival images, curated or aggregated projects,…

We are thrilled to announce that MediaStorm’s newly completed documentary features, Fight Hate With Love and The Distance Between Us, will have their U.S. premieres at the Cleveland International Film Festival, in separate competitive sections. Fight Hate With Love, a film about Philadelphia activist Michael Ta’Bon, and his “fight hate with love” movement aimed to disrupt the "womb to prison pipeline", will be screening as part of the Standing Up Competition on March 30th and March 31st. Director Andrew Michael Ellis will be in attendance. The Distance Between Us, focusing on the relationship between adult twin brothers Chris, a photojournalist, and Nick, who was born with cerebral palsy and still lives with his parents, will screen in the Global Health Competition on April 4th and April 5th. One of the film’s main characters, Chris Capozziello, will be in attendance. We are excited to share online for the first time the new theatrical…

MediaStorm is pleased to present a film about something we all spend way too much time talking about: sex. Return to the Body, a collaboration with Verse, takes a look at our culture’s relationship to sexuality through one woman’s experience, Rebecca Torosian. She has a hard time explaining what she does. "I'll just tell this person like I'm a mind-body coach and if they want to know more they can ask me," said Rebecca. Want to know more? Rebecca’s a sex surrogate. Rebecca’s work is a deep exploration of the mind-body connection, and how it can enliven or harm a healthy sex life. In Return to the Body, Rebecca works with Rob, a faithful husband, father, lawyer, and cancer survivor whose treatments left him unable to continue a fulfilling sexual relationship with his wife. In an effort to regain that connection to his own sexuality, he seeks Rebecca’s help. For Rebecca, “Sexuality, is…