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Vasant Nayak, co-founder and co-director of the MurthyNAYAK Foundation (MNF), worked with the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) to organize an invitational symposium in Delhi in winter 2020. By funding projects like this one, MNF hopes to offer encouragement and financial support to photographers and individuals who are guiding those soon entering the field. We believe photography raises our consciousness and awareness about important issues. MNF also sees gatherings such as this one – of practitioners and educators from South Asia – as opportunities to discuss common goals, obstructions, and potential solutions, possibly leading to future conferences.
For three days in January 2020, a small delegation of photography instructors, writers, curators, and practitioners from institutions of higher education in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka joined representatives from SPE and MNF to discuss the institutions and programs they represented, as well as the possibility of developing a future South Asia chapter of SPE. Recognizing the intrinsic value of engaging with colleagues from all over the world, SPE seeks to connect with photography educators, scholars, curators, and practitioners by creating international chapters or collaborative exchanges in key areas where individual interest and academic traditions of photographic education exist. SPE currently has an annual exchange with the Association for Photography in Higher Education in the UK.
To kick-start SPE’s engagement in South Asia, the MurthyNAYAK Foundation covered all expenses for the event and for the invited participants. A professor of photography at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore (USA) in the 1990s, Vasant left teaching to pursue several online ventures. His interest in photography – particularly in his home country of India – never left him. He is pleased to have this opportunity to give back to his homeland and to greater South Asia, and to pay it forward to a future generation of photographers.
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20 November
