Photographer Zun Lee was in residence at the college for three months in the spring of 2019. Zun Lee taught all semester in SOC 358: The Sociology of Beatties Ford Road with Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie which studied various aspects of social life in the area around the historically black Johnson C. Smith University, where the class often met. This iteration of the course required studnets to think through artistic representations of social problems.
He also made guest visits and lectures in nine other Davidson courses during the semester, in English, Art, Sociology, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Anthropology. He also taught several Visual and Multimedia Storytelling Master Classes throughout the semester for faculty and students which were both technical and pedagogical. He lectured on how artists, especially photographers, capture today’s pressing social problems, including housing equity, healthcare issues, and contemporary implications of slavery in our communities. Zun Lee collaborated with faculty members to incorporate photography into their current courses by offering workshops for students and for faculty and staff. He also accompanied students to neighborhoods in west Charlotte to do ethnographic research including ethical photography methods, as well as introducing them to a large network of local artists concerned with social problems.
The main objective of Zun Lee’s semester-long visit was to encourage our faculty, students, and staff to think about artistic representations of social problems, to encourage more to think of photography as an avenue to do their scholarly work, particularly that dealing with various social problems. He helped one senior student complete a documentary film, “N9NE Ours” for the Verna Case Symposium in May 2019, and took part in a panel discussion on housing inequality as part of the Challenge the Policy series. He held a final exhibit of his work based on his time in Charlotte’s historically African-American and now gentrifying neighborhoods. The exhibit was in a high-traffic area of the union atrium for two weeks, and roughly 50 people attended its opening night reception.
