9 Sacramento St.
Cambridge MA 02138-1843 USA
617-441-7756
July 2006, Boston Harbor, photo
by
Jerry Yatsko
Participatory photographer, socially engaged.
A participatory photographer, photographing while engaging in struggles for justice, peace, right treatment of the environment, and enlightenment, Skip Schiel makes photos for publications, exhibits, slide shows, and individual use. His main current project is a photographic examination of conditions in Palestine & Israel. Other projects include retracing the Transatlantic African slave trade journey (A Spirit People), the earth (Scent of Earth), prisons (Imprisoned Massachusetts), and an exploration of the impact of digital technology on photography.
Since 1992, he teaches photography at the Landscape Institute of Harvard University and the Cambridge Center of Adult Education, ranging from basic photography to digital darkroom and photographic field workshops concentrating on light in photography.
He joins with others in various campaigns for peace, justice, reconciliation, & truth-telling. He plays, experiments, & contemplates—might get arrested and imprisoned periodically. Maybe he joins a pilgrimage, a vigil, a rally or a talk or an outing along a river; maybe he simply stays home and absorbs the afternoon light.
He photographs: he is a socially engaged photographer.
He makes photographs for you a viewer, for his family and friends that you and they might know him more intimately, for himself to remember where and when he existed, and for you not yet born.
Besides his current project, he's photographed prisons in the United States, environmental desecration, racial justice, pilgrimage, South Africa, poverty, American Indians, the US South, and resistance to oppressive regimes in the US and abroad. He is exploring digital technology, curious about its influence on photography--producing, consuming, and thinking about the photograph. He invites you to examine what he;s made & see what you think.
--Skip Schiel, June 2005
In South Africa, 1999, photo by Louise Dunlap
At the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 2004,
photo by Steve Fitzsimmons