Fred Ritchin on Former Students Making Work That Matters

Fred Ritchin, who has been teaching photography since 1979, uses his Substack to highlight work by former students doing serious documentary and editorial work right now. The centrepiece is Cheney Orr's Reuters photograph from the Washington DC metro on July 4, showing a lone Black woman surrounded by masked Patriot Front members, which Ritchin argues deserved far more prominent placement than it got in the Independence Day news cycle. Alongside that, there are new books worth knowing about: Loubna Mrie's memoir 'Defiance' on growing up Alawite under Assad and joining the Syrian resistance, Julio Pantoja's 'Los Hijos' documenting children of the disappeared in Tucumán (Spanish only, no international distributor, contact the photographer directly), and Alexey Yurenev's 'Seeing Against Seeing', an artist book housed in a hand-welded iron case exploring his grandfather's WWII silence through synthetic imagery. This is editorial photography and photobook culture worth a look, even if it's not gear news.