Opening reception at HCP, Thursday, May 21 from 6-8 p.m.
Artist Talk at HCP, Thursday, May 21 starting at 5:30 p.m.

This year´s fellowship juror Natasha Egan, Associate Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College in Chicago, selected Israeli photojournalist Natan Dvir for the HCP Fellowship.

"According to the American Refugee committee, in 2008 there was an estimated 67 million people in need of international protection, 16 million refugees and asylum seekers and 51 internally displaced people, forced by conflict or natural disaster to flee their homes. Following the stories of individual refugees whose lives have been turned upside down, Israeli photographer Natan Dvir exposes this crisis to the international community. Shelter is an ongoing project focused particularly on the thousands of refugees from Sudan that have fled to Israel—a country with no policies in place to cope with the influx; and Colombia, where three million people have been uprooted by conflict but denied refugee status by their president. In the coming years Dvir plans to examine the massive flow of East African refugees into Tanzania as well as the natural disaster refugee population of China. Dvir´s pictures are as raw as they are beautiful.

"Dvir received his MBA from Tel Aviv University in 1998, but decided to become a documentary photographer. He began photographing for a number of Israeli publications and today his work has appeared in such publications as Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Le Monde, Stern, Die Zeit, among many others. He has exhibited in Israeli, Europe, South America and the Untied States and his work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tel Aviv Museum; Ben-Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art; Nahum Gutman Museum, Tel Aviv, and private collections. Dvir currently lives in New York." - N. Egan