Join PhotoAlliance for the 2025 lecture series with photographers Lewis Watts and Jonathan Mark Jackson. The “PhotoAlliance Lecture Series: Lewis Watts and Jonathan Mark Jackson” happens in the Bayfront Theatre, Building B, Third Floor, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture on Sunday, September 7, 2025, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. ($25).

This illuminating lecture features photographers Lewis Watts and Jonathan Mark Jackson, whose practices engage Black cultural memory, archival presence and absence, and photography as modes of reclamation and resistance.

Jonathan Mark Jackson’s poetic images activate ancestral spaces, using a mix of documentary methods and critical fabulation to confront historical narratives. He also explores the idea of haunting, which he defines in his practice as the “experience of entering a temporal state where the past, present, and future overlap.”

Together, they explore photography as an active force in shaping, challenging, and reimagining historical narratives. Don’t miss this dynamic conversation.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator, and Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California (UC) – Santa Cruz where he taught for 14 years. Before that he taught in the College of Environmental Design at UC – Berkeley. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African Diaspora. He is a documentary photographer and also examines the archive of 19th and 20th century African-American literature and ephemera. He is the co-author of Harlem Of The West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (2020, Heyday Books; 2006, Chronicle Books) and New Orleans Suite: Music And Culture In Transition (2013, UC Press), and “Portraits” (2020, Edition One Press). He is currently working on the photographic project, “Charleston And The Low Country” for the International African-American Museum in Charleston, SC, and on long-term projects: “Portraits of Black Creatives” and “The Effects Of Migration Throughout America, Europe, The Middle East, And Africa.”

His work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of The Center for Photographic Art Carmel, CA; The Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University (Seize the Time); Staatiche Kunstammiunger, Dresden, Germany: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art: University of Oregon; Autograph London; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Citè de La Musique, Paris, France; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; The Oakland Museum of California; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, CT; Light Work, Syracuse, NY; The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco; and The McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco; among others

Jonathan Mark Jackson received a BA in Art and The History Of Art from Amherst College, and a MFA in Photography from The Rhode Island School Of Design. He has held a residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY and has participated in group exhibitions nationally. He is a recipient of the Kodak Film Photo Award and the St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award. Jackson currently teaches at UC – Santa Cruz, in the role of Assistant Professor of Photography: Race, Representation, and Critical Practice.

NOTE: Students are always welcome to attend PhotoAlliance lectures for free. Please tell our check-in volunteer you are a student and show your school ID. There is no need for students to pre-register for a ticket in advance.