PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist
How can I use photographs as vehicles of resistance? In the digital collage Vote, I searched for images of
women’s struggles and triumphs to attain equal rights in relation to the 100th anniversary of the passage
of the 19th amendment and the current threat to voting rights. A punctured medicine blister pack is the
frame through which to view these archival images. Through openings made by pushing out medication
to relieve pain, we can view the past and
Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and founding director of Tisch Future Imagemakers, a free social practice photography program for NYC area high school students. Her photographs, installations, and web projects are concerned with the afterlife of images. She uses various technologies of representation to explore issues of memory and transmission, identity and loss, presence and absence, shifting cultural meanings of photographs, and the relationship between the intimate and the public. She is currently part of the 100 Years | 100 women project at the
Park Ave Armory, NYC. Other current projects include her ongoing Above The Fold, where she has saved the front-page sections of The New York Times since 1999, categorizing and analyzing them according to the content of the photograph above the fold; and Migraine Register, a study of her struggle with chronic migraine. Her web project collectedvisions.net (1996-present), exploring how family photographs shape our memory was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites. Novak’s work has
been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her photographs are included in many museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art; The Jewish Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.