Nathaniel Brunt is the recipient of the 2016 Portfolio Reviews Exhibition Award. He will discuss his work in the Kashmir Valley, and his current exhibition #shaheed.

Saturday March 18, 2pm, CONTACT Gallery

#shaheed explores the evolution of photojournalism and its current role in documenting conflict, while seeking to visually unpack the complex war in the Kashmir Valley. The exhibition is comprised of black-and-white photographs taken in the region by Canadian photographer Nathaniel Brunt, and nearly two hundred colour images and videos that Brunt was given by Kashmiri families and that he collected online from social media. Brunt exhibits these varied forms of photography and video together, thereby expanding his role from photographer to collector and archivist. The adjacency of the images gives viewers the opportunity to see multiple subjectivities at play and to discover more nuanced connections, while their placement speaks to the enormous quantity of images created and shared online daily. By including photographs created by non-professionals who are actively and intimately involved in the Valley's conflict, Brunt steps away from the hierarchical distribution of photojournalism, presenting a much more progressive and horizontal manner of contextualization and visual storytelling.