10.20.2026
Renowned as both artist and documentarian, Constantine Manos was also gifted as a teacher and mentor. He became the heart of a thriving community of young Boston photographers who gathered around him for critique, practical advice, and stories from the field. Stella Johnson, Lisa Kessler, and Rania Matar were part of that world, having met Costa while their work was still taking shape. Today, all three are widely respected photographers, recognized with major prizes and publications across fields ranging from photojournalism to fine art, and as educators themselves. In a lively evening of anecdotes and reminiscence, the panel explored Manos’s lengthy career, and his legacy as photographer, humanist and friend.
About the Speakers
Alison Nordstrom is an independent scholar, writer and curator, specializing in photography. She was Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography, and Senior Curator of Photographs/Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House. She has curated over 150 photographic exhibitions in nine countries, including Truth/Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, Lewis Hine, and Ideas in Things: Photography and Materiality. She is the author of over 100 books and essays on photographic topics among them Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World (2013) and her friend Constantine Manos’s American Color (2009). Since 2021, she has organized Photo Soup, an annual gathering of selected workers in the field of photography with the aim of preserving personal histories and ideas in a series of publications. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Nordström is currently a Museum Associate at Harvard University. She holds the PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.
Lisa Kessler is a Boston-based photographer and educator whose long-term documentary projects move between the intimate and the political, exploring American culture and contemporary social issues. Most recently, she completed a project on Boston’s last middle school, continuing her effort to complicate deep-rooted narratives and public memories. Her work has been supported by the George Gund Foundation, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and others, and is held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has taught at BU, BC, and the International Center of Photography, and is represented by Anderson Yezerski Gallery.
Rania Matar is a Lebanese American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Her work has been widely exhibited, in solo and group shows, in museums worldwide including Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, LACMA, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, L’Institut du Monde Arabe, Fotografiska, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of numerous museums. Matar is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. She was a finalist for Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Matar published five books: Where Do I Go? (KAPH, 2026), SHE (Radius, 2021), L’Enfant-Femme (Damiani, 2016), A Girl and Her Room (Umbrage Editions, 2012), and Ordinary Lives (Quantuck Lane Press, 2009).
Stella Johnson is a photographer and educator known for her intimate, empathetic documentary work. For over forty years, she has built long-term relationships in communities across Mexico, Nicaragua, Cameroon, and Greece, creating images rooted in trust and shared experience. During the COVID pandemic, she found a similar sense of community at Venice Beach Skate Park in California, reinforcing her belief in the power of human connection. More recently, her project The Ghost Bride explores the loss of cultural traditions in Oaxaca, Mexico. Johnson is a Fulbright Scholar and the author of Al Sol (2008) and ZOI (2018), which reflect her enduring focus on community and cultural continuity.