Live online talks
conversations & recordings
A growing space for conversations that question how we see, who gets seen and what it means to make work with care.
PLATFORM 2020 talks bring together photographers, writers, curators and practitioners for live and recorded conversations on photography, ethics, representation, authorship and the politics of seeing. These are spaces for depth, exchange and critical reflection, rooted in lived experience and shaped by voices speaking from within - not about - the places and histories they engage. They are also spaces for speaking plainly about some of the more uncomfortable truths within documentary practice and for working to realign the conversation around representation, power and the balance of who gets seen, who gets heard and who gets to tell the story.
Featured Series
ON SEEING & BEING SEEN
A four-part conversation series co-curated by PLATFORM 2020 and The VII Foundation.
Across four conversations, we bring together practitioners connected to Africa and SWANA to reflect on authorship, power and responsibility in visual storytelling today. These are exchanges shaped by lived experience, led by people telling their own stories and making work that resists the easy frame. Together, they open up more nuanced, self-defined ways of seeing that move beyond stereotype, cliché and crisis-centred narratives.
All conversations are recorded and published here following each live event, creating a growing archive of the series over time.
With support from PhotoWings
Now available to watch
Memory as Resistance: Archives, Inheritance & the Politics of Remembering
Recorded live on 9 April 2026
Who decides how memory endures, and what role does photography play in shaping collective narratives?
Images have long been a tool for preserving, reclaiming and reinterpreting personal and collective histories. From family albums to colonial archives, photography carries the weight of identity and inheritance, shaping how stories are told, whose voices are heard and what is remembered.
This first conversation centres perspectives too often misrepresented or overlooked, opening up a more nuanced understanding of how memory is constructed and contested through photography.
Writer, educator and curator Max Houghton is joined by Sana Ginwalla, founder of Everyday Lusaka and Zambia Belonging, a counter-archive rooted in Lusaka’s studio histories, and Ziyah Gafic, Director of Education and contributing photographer at The VII Foundation, whose early life was shaped by the siege of Sarajevo and displacement. Together, they reflect on photography’s role in holding memory, resisting erasure and reimagining the past through lived experience.
Beyond Crisis: Reframing the Image of a Region
Past Talks
photo © Laura El-Tantawy, from I’ll Die For YouWho gets to define a region, and what happens when photography becomes trapped inside the language of crisis?
For too long, images from across Africa and SWANA have been flattened by repetition, shaped through war, catastrophe and spectacle, while other realities, histories and forms of presence are pushed aside. This conversation asks what it means to move beyond that.
With Hrair Sarkissian, Renée Mussai and Ali Arkady.
COMING NEXT
The next conversations in On Seeing & Being Seen will be added here over time. Return for upcoming live events, new recordings and the growing archive of the series.