Born 1976, in Nashua, NH, lives and works in Cambridge, MA and various other places including Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Amman (Jordan), and Sheshatshiu (Labrador, Canada)
Received his MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and his BA from Duke University, Durham, NC
www.ericgottesman.net
Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
Since 1999, Eric Gottesman has been working in and around the Middle East and Africa as an artist, activist, and teacher. Gottesman uses photography – its technical skills, communicative capacity, and history—to collaborate with people and communities using local image-making techniques to produce images that often challenge both preexisting or outsiders’ images of that site as well as the concept of singular photographic authorship. Over 10 years ago, he founded the art collective Sudden Flowers with a group of children whose parents died of AIDS in a neighborhood of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that produces photographs, videos, installations, and performances in their own community. Gottesman is interested in how photography functions within the social sphere as the repository for individual and collective memory and as factual and fictional documents.
